Jeff Dawson and a team of researchers at Carleton University are studying how insects fly, right to the smallest detail. The Goal: To use their knowledge to develop micro-air vehicles.
It’s late afternoon and Jeff Dawson is inspecting a locust that is glued to a stand with electrodes stuck in its flight muscles. A student uses software to determine what the insect’s muscles are doing during flight.
In a small room one floor down from this Carleton University biology lab, a locust colony, spread out in half-a-dozen cages, thrives. The creatures eat wheat grass and carrots, fly and mate. They’ll live for about four months under these circumstances and are used for various flight-related experiments in Mr. Dawson’s lab.
Back upstairs, the student is having trouble. This particular creature of biblical renown seems a bit lazy, and the student has to keep blowing air on it to wake it up and get it to fly. As he does, he makes the experiment look pretty low-tech. It all seems like basic biology — except that it has a high-tech purpose.
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