Thread by @AlexeyPolilov

I am proud of the work of our team on the flight of the smallest beetles, published in the third issue of @Nature this year.
nature.com/articles/s4158…
1/9

@Nature 2/9. This is a study of the flight of one of the smallest insects, comparable in size to unicellular organisms

@Nature 3/9. We showed earlier that the smallest beetles have extraordinary flight characteristics. But how is this excellent performance achieved?
pnas.org/content/117/40…

@Nature 4/9. We made the first recordings of the flight of featherwing beetles 6 years ago. But we could not discern any details in those recordings

@Nature 5/9. To obtain records that could be used in our work, we had to design a special setup for recording the free flight of microinsects

@Nature 6/9. And now we work with synchronous macro video recordings of free flight from multiple projections

@Nature 7/9. Our experiments combine 3D reconstructions of morphology, kinematics and aerodynamic in one of the smallest insects, the beetle Paratuposa placentis (body length 395 μm).

@Nature 8/9. We show that this performance results from the reduced wing mass and a previously unknown type of wing motion cycle.

@Nature 9/9. And finally, a small video clip about our expedition to Vietnam to study the flight of microinsects, the results of which formed the basis of this article.