Abstract
Ontogenetic locomotion research focuses on the evolution of locomotion behavior in different developmental stages of a species. Unlike vertebrates, ontogenetic locomotion in invertebrates is poorly investigated. Locusts represent an outstanding biological model to study this issue. They are hemimetabolous insects and have similar aspects and behaviors in different instars. This research is aimed at studying the jumping performance of Locusta migratoria over different developmental instars. Jumps of third instar, fourth instar, and adult L. migratoria were recorded through a high-speed camera. Data were analyzed to develop a simplified biomechanical model of the insect: the elastic joint of locust hind legs was simplified as a torsional spring located at the femur-tibiae joint as a semilunar process and based on an energetic approach involving both locomotion and geometrical data. A simplified mathematical model evaluated the performances of each tested jump. Results showed that longer hind leg length, higher elastic parameter, and longer takeoff time synergistically contribute to a greater velocity and energy storing/releasing in adult locusts, if compared to young instars; at the same time, they compensate possible decreases of the acceleration due to the mass increase. This finding also gives insights for advanced bioinspired jumping robot design.
Highlights
Humans develop locomotion ability at the age of around one year [1]
The trajectory of the body center during the takeoff phase of L. migratoria was close to a straight line, and takeoff angle was defined as the slope angle of the body center trajectory of the tested locusts during takeoff [54, 55]
Results showed that the jumping performance of L. migratoria adults outperformed those of young instars, both in terms of absolute velocity (Figure 3(a)) and mass specific work (Figure 3(f))
Summary
A wide number of animals get their locomotion ability after being born [2]. This fact can be related to the prolonged parental care performed by humans compared to other animal species, in which juvenile individuals often face the same survival pressure as adult ones. There is a wide number of researches focused on the ontogenetic locomotion ability in vertebrate animals [1, 7, 15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23], only a few studies are focused on invertebrate animals [2, 24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31], and most of them are focused on the jumping ability of locusts
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