Beautiful Animated Infographic Of Wing Movement During Flight

I'm really jealous of the Egyptian fruit bat. I'm also jealous of dragonflies, geese, hawk moths and hummingbirds. I'm jealous because I can't fly, and they can.

How those five species fly is the subject of Eleanor Lutz's latest animated infographic. A Seattle-based designer with a degree in molecular biology from the University of Washington, Lutz creates science-themed illustrations and infographics based on peer-reviewed papers and textbooks. For this month's graphic, she tracked the wingbeats and mapped the path of the wing along imaginary curves. The process was inspired by her undergraduate work in a research lab tracking mosquito larvae.

"We used a Matlab program to manually input the larva's location during thousands of video frames," Lutz said. For the flying species, she used the same frame-mapping process on slow-motion videos found on YouTube:

"I found slow-motion videos of five flying species, and mapped out specific points on the wings during one wingbeat. I ended up with 15 frames per wingbeat, and I connected every frame using imaginary curves that went through all of the 15 mapped points.

"Of course, 15 frames isn't nearly enough for any kind of factual conclusion, so this week's post is just an art exercise. But hopefully you can enjoy this as an artistic pattern based on real life."

Fifteen frames may not be enough for a scientific study, but it was enough for her to produce this artistic, animated gif.

Lutz's sources include Bats in Slow Motion 2, by the Cranbrook Institute of Science; "Life in the Undergrowth," by David Attenborough; Geese taking flight, by Edward Tufte; Hummingbird in slow motion, by Masateru Maeda, Chiba University; and Moth feeding from a flower, by the Riffell Lab, University of Washington. You can buy a poster or canvas version of her work on Artsider.