Butterfly Wing Veins Are Not in Vain

Inventors made an artificial butterfly modeled on the tiger swallowtail.  First they made the wing without veins.  It didn’t fly as well as when they added veins like the real butterfly, according to a short video clip in an article on New Scientist.  The veined wing provided more lift.
    The inventors at Harvard’s microrobotics lab power their “butterfly-type ornithopter” or BTO with just a rubber band.  It’s the first flying insect replica that matches the real thing in size and weight, they said.  The article says their project has been published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/5/2/026003.

It matches in weight with a rubber band.  Now try keeping the weight constant while providing constant flapping power from an energy source, and providing the ability to extract energy from the environment, remote sensing with compound eyes and elaborate coded olfactory senses, rapid-firing muscles, photonic crystals, articulating limbs, and the ability to reproduce with four-stage metamorphosis via a complex genetic coded transcription and translation system using thousands of molecular machines.  That will be the day Harvard can brag a little.  “Just like the real thing” the photo caption says next to a photo of a tiger swallowtail.  They’ve got to be kidding.  It’s nothing more than a cheap dime-store toy painted like a butterfly on the outside.  We’ll give them partial credit for learning something about wing veins having a purpose, and for avoiding mention of evolution.