Q. What do birds, bats, fish, insects, marine mammals, and swimming mollusks called pteropods have in common?
A. Flexible propulsor systems.  During steady swimming, many of these animals bend their propulsive structures in a stereotyped pattern.

The paper.

Lucas KN, Johnson N, Beaulieu WT, Cathcart E, Tirrell G, Colin SP, Gemmell BJ, Dabiri JO, and Costello JH. 2014. Bending rules for animal propulsion. Nat Commun. 5:3293 doi: 10.1038/ncomms4293.

Go to paper

The story.

After the paper was published, I was invited to give an address as an alumni speaker at Rhode Island's NSF EPSCoR Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship symposium.  Amy Dunkle, communications coordinator for the program, interviewed me for an article about the project and the SURF experience.  The article was published in The Current, the program's magazine, in the Spring 2014 issue (see page 21).

Read the article (pg 21)

The lesson.

I collaborated with a fellow grad student, a couple local high school teachers, and the ComSciCon/BiteScis team (see more information here) to develop lesson plans based on the research project.  The activity covers convergent evolution and proportions, and meets Next Generation Science Standards.
Lesson: Fins, Wings, and...Math?  |  Student reading

Media coverage.

*Click titles to go to articles.​

1. The Secret of Jellyfish by John Bohannon
2. The benefits of bendy wings by Philip Ball
3. Quest for jellyfish robot leads to the discovery of design similarity across wide range of animal propulsors by Diana Kenney (also available here)
4. Wing and fin motions share universal principles by Philip Ball
5. Whether whale or moth, animals that swim or fly use universal rules by Amina Khan
6. The Ways Animals Move Could Help Humans by Keith Randall
7. Wings and fins bend...in the same way by Dmitry Malkov