23 Amazing Insects in Flight – Slow Motion!

These are green June beetles, and for me they're interesting to see in flight because of the special thing their front wings are doing. For comparison, in this video we'll look at slow motion flight footage I've gathered from 23 species across seven different insect orders. We'll see how diverse and extraordinary insect flight behavior and anatomy can be. Okay, back to those June beetles. The hardened protective front wings, or elytra, stay linked together and covering their bodies during flight. As you'll see in a minute, most other beetles don't do this. Now, if these big beetles were flying by, you'd hear the buzz of their wings because they're flapping at about 110 beats per second. The footage you're seeing now was gathered at 6,000 frames per second. These nearly ping pong ball-sized insects buzz above grassy fields in the summer on the east coast of the U.S. Inside view, when they're getting ready to fly, you can see how the elytra are lifted slightly off the body so that the beetle can begin to deploy the hind wings. Once the wings are out, a few short flaps shake out the two folds in them and the beetle is ready to take off. From this footage, it looks like the small central folding and flapping motion of the elytra is because the hind wings are actually hitting up against them and pushing on them with every upstroke. Now for comparison, check out what this Asian lady beetle does. The elytra are lifted up and out of the way while the hind wings are being fully extended. There's actually an interesting little biological easter egg here too. If you look here on the elytra, that is an ectoparasitic fungus that specializes on infecting and growing on insect cuticles. It won't kill the beetle and it doesn't seem to get in the way of flight either. When the lady beetle takes off, the hind wings never bump the raised elytra and in comparison to the june beetle, the wings swing through a lot more space going nearly 180 degrees from the back to the front of the body. So I filmed those lady beetles flying about two years ago and since then I've collected a lot of footage similar to that across a whole bunch of different types of insects. So I thought for this, it'd be interesting to put all that footage together in one thing that compares insect flight across a whole bunch of different species. In this video, there's 23 different types of insects and that's just a tiny sliver of overall insect biodiversity. Okay, let's get back to it starting with some stoneflies. This is a common or golden stonefly. It's a big insect that lives around streams and can be attracted to lights, which is how I encountered this one. Stoneflies are the only insects you'll see in this video that use both their front and hind wings for flight without linking them together. Here you can see what I mean again in this one from a different family, a rolled winged stonefly. In the first few wing beats, the front wing is ahead of and slightly out of sync with the hind ones. Right when these ones reach the edge of the frame, their wings seem to match up with each other and flap in unison. Now these of course are flies, two very different ones from different families. On the left is a hoverfly or flowerfly. Sometimes hoverflies are big and bee or wasp-like in coloration. This small black one doesn't appear very wasp-like to me, but its agile and steady flight pattern I think does evoke that comparison. On the right is a snipefly. These get their common name from their beak-like proboscis, which resembles that of a bird with the same name. Compared to the hoverfly, it's huge and its wing beat frequency is about half as fast. Now these are black soldier flies, the same one actually, filmed twice and composited here into a single shot. The interesting thing is that on the right, it jumps into the air with its wings still folded to start a flight. But on the left, takeoff happens after a series of wing flaps while the fly is still standing on the ground. Even within a single individual, variation in flight behaviors can be pretty dramatic. With this fly, a bristlefly, the dramatic aspect of it is in its legs. When it jumps into a flight, the last thing to leave the ground are the middle legs, which they kind of have to be because they're twice as long as the other ones. Long middle legs in this species are a trait of just the males, and it's a parasitic fly that targets weevils as a host. In fact, a lot of flies, like the one on the left here, are parasitoids of other insects. The left one is a thick-headed fly, which specializes on attacking bees. It injects an adult bee with one of its eggs, and that fly egg will hatch and develop inside of the bee host, eventually consuming and killing it. The adult fly will then emerge from the corpse of the bee host to start the cycle again. To catch the host bees, the parasitoid hangs out around flowers, and the fly on the right, a clubbed mitis fly, does too. But it's just there for the nectar and pollen. It injects its eggs into rotten wood, where the can hunt down beetle grubs for food. Both of these flies are visually very similar in appearance to wasps. In fact, the mitis fly, with its orange banded abdomen and black body, is a near-perfect match to the appearance of some spider wasps. So, for lepidopterans, moths, and butterflies, I thought it'd be interesting to put these two groups side by side for a direct visual comparison. This scene shows you a forest tent caterpillar moth, filmed at 6,000 frames per second on the left, and a monarch butterfly, filmed at 5,000 frames per second on the right. The difference in wingbeat rate between these two is huge. The moth completes a wingbeat in 15 milliseconds, while it takes the butterfly 90. Here, about six moth wingbeats happen for every one of the butterflies. The same thing is true for these two species too, but what I think this comparison shows is how different wing patterning and body cover can be. On the right, when you see the underside of this butterfly's wing, you can see why its common name is a tiger leafwing butterfly. The leaf-like patterning and the colorful top side is made up of shingle-like scales covering the wing. Moths, like the one on the left, are also covered in scales, but theirs can be long and more hair-like. This moth, a tufted thiaturian's name, reflects the tuft of long hair-like scales sticking up off its thorax. Another example of wing-based camouflage are these two lepidopterans, a green owlet moth on the left and a cracker butterfly on the right. Both use the coloring patterns on the top side of their wings to blend in with lichen-speckled tree bark while they're at rest. And finally for the leps, here on the left you'll see two closely related species of geometric moths in the genus Macaria. The explosive flight patterns are showing here are similar to what they'd be doing if they were disturbed into flight from a resting spot on vegetation. In contrast to their hurried escapes, the zebra long-winged butterfly on the right seemed to hover in front of my camera. In fact, if you watch its body during each of the wing beats, you'll see it rise with every downstroke and then a slight drift back down with every upstroke of the wing. The next group of bugs in the video are just that, true bugs, Heteropterans in the insect order Hemiptera. This one is an assassin bug. Some bugs are strong flyers in front of the camera, but this one was more motivated to use its wings to direct and cushion the gliding path down off the filming platform. Despite being unmotivated to fly here, this species is known to be attracted to fly to light traps at night, which is how I was able to find and film this specimen. In contrast to that, this one's an azalea plant bug. As the name suggests, you can find this one on your backyard shrubs. It's more of an omnivore than the assassin bug, oftentimes feeding on flower pollen. Also, unlike the assassin bug, a strong hind leg-powered jump kicks it off into an upward wing-powered flight. Jumping into a flight seems to be a common thing for plant bugs. Here's another species, and what's likely a different subfamily of plant bug, showing a similar style of leg-powered leaping to get into the air. Okay, I just have one more insect to show here. It's a cockroach, but it might be one of the prettiest cockroaches I've ever seen. This is a Cuban cockroach, or what's sometimes called a green banana roach. This scene is showing the same individual filmed twice and combined into a single frame. Like the soldier fly earlier in the video, this again shows that flight behaviors can be widely variable. On the left, it does a looping downward flight, and on the right, a straightforward ascending directional flight. So that's all the insect flight clips I have for now, and I hope after seeing all this, you've been able to see and appreciate insects in some new way. Thanks for watching!