Stacey Combes is a co-author on a new paper by former Combes Lab member Sridhar Ravi, on how bumblebees perceive the spatial layout of their environment in relation to their own body size and form to minimize inflight collisions. The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA shows that bumblebees yaw to fly sideways through gaps, adopting a yaw angle precisely tuned to their own wingspan relative to the gap size. The paper has been covered by New Scientist and the BBC News World Service’s “The Newsroom” (starting time 20:04).
