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A new experiment reported in Physical Review Letters shows that—contrary to popular wisdom—paddling can be as effective in air as it is in water. This could imply that insects evolved their flight capability from some earlier swimming trait.

Using high-speed video cameras to track wing motion, the team observed certain cases where the flies paddled their wings forward and backward. To confirm that this was indeed drag-based motion, the team plugged their wing data into an “insect flight simulator” and found that they could reproduce the fly’s overall movement. The authors constructed a simple model of paddling, which seems to support the theory that insect wings evolved in water.