How Fast is 100 Beats a Second

SCIENCE CONCEPT:

Insects, the first creatures to develop wings, are the oldest known true flyers. Their tiny, but powerful, muscles allow most insects to twist and sway their wings in figure eights, thus enabling them to fly forward, hover, or even fly backwards.

STUDENT OBJECTIVE:

The student will perform a task for a period of time and relate this to the rate at which some insects flap their wings.

OVERVIEW:

In this activity, the student will be given several separate tasks and will be asked to perform the task for a period of time (i.e. 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute) and relate it to the rate at which insects flap their wings. Some examples of tasks would be: 1. Erase the blackboard for 10 seconds and then lift the eraser for 10 seconds and then erase the blackboard for 10 seconds again. Have the student repeat the task for 1 minute. 2. Have the student move his left arm in a circular motion for 20 seconds and then stop for 5 seconds and then repeat the task with their right arm. Have the student repeat the task for 3 minutes. 3. Have the student hop on one foot for 5 seconds and then change feet and hop on the other foot for 5 seconds. Ask the student to repeat the task and continue for 2 minutes. In this way the student will get an experiential sense of the number of times an insect flaps its wing in beats per second.

PREPARATION TIME:

20 minutes.

LESSON TIME:

30 minutes.

TEACHER PREP:

Gather books at the library on insects that the students can look at. Choose books that include photographs.

WORDS TO KNOW:

twist

sway

figure eights

hover

rapid beats

TEACHER TEXT:

Insects, the first creatures to develop wing, are the oldest known true flyers. They have been flying for a long, long time. There are more than 800,000 species of insects living in all parts of the world, including in fresh water and in oceans. Thousands more are discovered every year. Wings are so fundamental to insecthood that they are not mere modified limbs, like bat or bird wings, but part of the insect's back. Their wings are a basic structure of its external skeleton, delicately strutted with passages for air and blood.

Originally, all winged insects had four separate wings as do all dragonflies today. But the fore and aft pairs of more recent types generally function as single flight surfaces, responding to the feel of moving air through the wonderful sail-setting of specialized flight muscles, and held together by ingenious devices such as the zippers on the wings of a wasp.

Because they are also the smallest of all flying animals, insects need less power than birds and bats to fly. Their tiny, but powerful, muscles allow most insects to twist and sway their wings in figure eights, thus enabling them to fly forward, hover, or even fly backwards. Insects are considered the most maneuverable of all flying creatures. In insects who display tremendous amounts of wing beats per cycle, it has long been suspected that their beating is sustained elastically like the vibrations of a tuning fork, that kinetic energy lost by the wings as they are halted at the end of one stroke is stored in springs that recoil elastically to provide the kinetic energy for the next.

A dragonfly flaps its two pairs of wings alternately, the front ones rising as the rear ones fall. Although bees' wings seem too small to enable flight, their rapid beats of over 100 times a second allow them to move forward, backward and up and down. A housefly can somersault in flight to land upside down on a ceiling.

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Last modified: Sat Nov 15 13:04:34 PST 1997