Sofia Chang

Aerodynamics of load carrying by flying insects

I am studying how small flying animals carry loads, focusing on how carrying large blood meals affects the take-off performance of a mosquitoes. I use high-speed videography to quantify how wing kinematics and flight performance are altered when mosquitoes carry a blood load, and I will be measuring the energetic cost of load-carrying during flight. In addition, I am using phylogenetic and scaling analyses to unravel the evolutionary morphology of mosquitoes that feed on blood versus those that have lost that capability.

Publications

Muijres, F.T., S.W. Chang, W.G. vanVeen, J. Spitzen, B.T. Biemans, M. A. R. Koehl, R. Dudley (2017) Escaping blood-fed malaria mosquitoes minimize tactile detection without compromising on take-off speed. J. Exp. Biol. 220: 3751-3762. doi:10.1242/jeb.163402