... but also need to resist excessive stresses caused by accidental collisions. This Commentary provides a summary of the literature on damage-reducing morphological adaptations in wings, covering natural causes of wing collisions, their impact on the structural integrity of wings and associated consequences...

... exclusion of collision loss and a simplistic strategy that does nothing to decrease collisional energy loss is a compromise that involves the least net work, and this is the strategy employed by terrestrial animals. The energy loss at each step also depends on step length. If steps are very small...

...-tailed lemurs, and extend this expectation to the COM power (‘mechanical cost of locomotion’; Eqn 17 ) to link our classical and collisional COM measurements. Finally, we compared our measured φ against the expected values for a ‘spring-like’ (λ+θ) collision, the collisional fraction ( Lee et al...

... to walking down a gentle slope in order to overcome collisional losses. The relevance of the energetic cost of collisions at each limb placement is being increasingly understood in a variety of locomotory systems, including bipedal walking ( Kuo, 2002 ; Donelan et al., 2002 ; Collins et al., 2005 ), gibbon...

... overshoot results in an imperfect contact, and some collisional energy losses, whereas a small undershoot of the handhold results in a complete miss,a subsequent fall, and high likelihood of injury or death. We develop a simple point-mass model (Model 2) of energetic losses due to collision during...