scaling of soaring seabirds and implications for flight abilities of giant pterosaurs飙升的海鸟和缩放影响巨大的翼龙的飞行能力.pdfVIP

Scaling of Soaring Seabirds and Implications for Flight Abilities of Giant Pterosaurs 1 2 3 4 1 Katsufumi Sato *, Kentaro Q. Sakamoto , Yutaka Watanuki , Akinori Takahashi , Nobuhiro Katsumata , ´ 5, Henri Weimerskirch5 Charles-Andre Bost 1 International Coastal Research Center, Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Otsuchi, Iwate, Japan, 2 Graduate School of Veterinary Medicine, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 3 Graduate School of Fisheries Sciences, Hokkaido University, Hakodate, Japan, 4 National Institute of Polar Research, Itabashi, Tokyo, Japan, ´ 5 Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chize-CNRS, Villier en Bois, Beauvoir/Niort, France Abstract The flight ability of animals is restricted by the scaling effects imposed by physical and physiological factors. In comparisons of the power available from muscle and the mechanical power required to fly, it is predicted that the margin between the powers should decrease with body size and that flying animals have a maximum body size. However, predicting the absolute value of this upper limit has proven difficult because wing morphology and flight styles varies among species. Albatrosses and petrels have long, narrow, aerodynamically efficient wings and are considered soaring birds. Here, using animal-borne accelerometers, we show that soaring seabirds have two modes of flapping frequencies under natural conditions: vigorous flapping during takeoff and sporadic flapping during cruising flight. In these species, high and low flapping frequencies were found to scale with body mass (mass20.30 and mass20.18) in a manner similar to the predictions from biomechanical flight models