Flight without wings

Flying: Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas ants do it!

If you drop a worker ant from an Amazonian treetop, what happens? In the species Cephalotes atratus, 87 percent of the time, that ant will wind up back where it started — a few meters lower down the same tree. Drop things that drift down at random, and only 5 percent of them will hit the tree.

In other words, these ants are controlling their flight — even though they don’t have wings.

That finding, which Stephen Yanoviak, Robert Dudley and Michael Kaspari¹ reported in 2005, provides a great starting point for untangling one of the mysteries of biology:

When and how did so animals take to the air?

Fly high

Flight is pretty common — among critters with wings, or something that resembles them, like a stretched membrane of skin. Birds, bats, moths and butterflies can fly. Even some lizards, snakes, fish and squirrels can glide under control toward the ground, which is not the same thing as falling.

Studies of ants in South America provide good data on “controlled aerial descent,” says Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley. In the course of some rather entertaining research, he and his colleagues have found that Cephalotes atratus ants:

During the controlled descent, at speeds above 4 meters per second, the ants perform “rapid postural adjustments,” Dudley says. “The limbs are moving, it’s not like a paper airplane.”

Dudley, an expert in the biomechanics of flight, says hundreds of species of tree-living ants in tropical Amazonian forests have evolved controlled gliding. Dropping to the forest floor can make them a meal for a mean and hungry ground-dwelling ant.

Looking at evolution

Perhaps the coolest part of the story is its evolutionary angle. Previously, scientists intrigued by the origin of flight have looked for evidence of wings and feathers, which appear more than 100 million years back in the fossil record.

But if flight really originated in arthropods that could not survive a fall from a tree or a cliff, that could wind the evolutionary clock back a good deal further. (Arthropods are animals with external skeletons and jointed legs, including spiders, insects and crustaceans like the horseshoe crab.)

Gliding under control is neither rare nor constrained to ants, Dudley says. “There are wingless aphids and flat spiders that live under the bark that can glide at a 45° angle. Controlled aerial descent has hundreds or thousands of independent origins in terrestrial arthropods.”

As old as the hills?

Over all, Dudley says, directed descent probably originated about 280 million years. If jumping like a flea or grasshopper is also deemed a form of flight, the origin could date back more than 400 million years.

The gliding hypothesis would not only help explain the origin of a common and cool behavior, but could take wind out of the sails for a favorite anti-evolutionary argument. Creationists, Dudley notes, have long demanded to know how wings evolved by asking, “What good is half a wing?” But according to the gliding hypothesis, wings unable to hold an animal airborne could still have evolved to help control a descending behavior that had long been in existence.

Flight of the control freaks?

Controlled gliding, Dudley says, “preceded the origin of wings, and so the evolution of flight is more about control than about the formation of wings.”

The new analysis “addresses qualms about the [supposed] lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record,” Dudley says. “Here is a viable intermediate form. There are lots of behavioral and ecological contexts where stubby, partial airfoils are useful.”

– David J. Tenenbaum