Mystery Solved: How Bats Can Land Upside Down
The flying mammals have some of the heaviest wings in nature, which has made their acrobatic feats a puzzle for scientists—until now.
A landing bat is one of nature’s most remarkable stunts. Flitting into some nook or hollow, the winged mammal can flip itself over and come to rest hanging head first—all in mere seconds.
How bats pull off these upside-down feats has long been a puzzle, not least because bats have the heaviest wings, relative to overall body weight, of any flying animal.
Now scientists think they have the answer. Turning their cumbersome wings into an advantage, bats use the extra weight to generate the force needed to execute their unique maneuvers, a new study says. (Also see "How Do Swarming Bats Avoid Crashing Into Each Other?")
In the experiments, published November 16 in the journal PLOS Biology, scientists trained Seba’s short-tailed
