Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 510-512Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0029
Keywords
aerial gliding; Archaeognatha; evolution; flight; tropics
Categories
Funding
- Smithsonian Monitoring and Assessing Biodiversity Program
- National Zoological Park
- National Science Foundation [IOS-0837866]
- National Geographic Society [CRE 7896-05]
- Division Of Integrative Organismal Systems
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0837866, 1337130] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Directed aerial descent (i.e. gliding and manoeuvring) may be an important stage in the evolution of winged flight. Although hypothesized to occur in ancestrally wingless insects, such behaviour is unexplored in extant basal hexapods, but has recently been described in arboreal ants. Here we show that tropical arboreal bristletails (Archaeognatha) direct their horizontal trajectories to tree trunks in approximately 90 per cent of falls. Experimental manipulation of the median caudal filament significantly reduced both success rate (per cent of individuals landing on a tree trunk) and performance (glide index) versus controls. The existence of aerial control in the ancestrally wingless bristletails, and its habitat association with an arboreal lifestyle, are consistent with the hypothesis of a terrestrial origin for winged flight in insects.
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