Wings as inertial appendages: how bats recover from aerial stumbles.

For many animals, movement through complex natural environments necessitates the evolution of mechanisms that enable recovery from unexpected perturbations. Knowledge of how flying animals contend with disruptive forces is limited, however, and is nearly nonexistent for bats, the only mammals capable of powered flight. We investigated perturbation recovery in by administering a well-defined jet of compressed air, equal to 2.