modes of bats vary widely among families, so we focused on a single family, the Pteropodidae. This family consists of ca. 186 species distributed throughout the paleotropics (Wilson and Reeder, 2005) and is characterized by fruit and nectar-feeding, non-echolocating Accepted 26 None of the bats in our study flew at constant speed, so we used multiple regression to isolate the changes in wing kinematics that correlated with changes in flight speed, horizontal acceleration and vertical acceleration. We uncovered several significant trends that were consistent among species. Our results demonstrate that for medium-to large-sized bats, the ways that bats modulate their wing kinematics to produce thrust and lift over the course of a wingbeat cycle are independent of body size.
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