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The mosquito equivalent of getting hit by a truck isn't actually so bad, according to engineers and biologists studying how the insects are able to fly in the rain.

Every time a mosquito goes for a jaunt in a downpour, it's like a human running across a motorway. Raindrops weigh about 50 times as much as a mosquito, and fall so fast that it's impossible for the insects to avoid them. When one hits, the creature is smacked downwards with a force up to 300 times that of gravity.


But unlike a human getting hit by a truck, the mosquito simply buzzes onward, according to a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They hooked up high-speed cameras to find out how the insect's body structure allows it to weather the weather.

The team, led by David Hu, constructed a "flight arena" comprising of a 20-centimentre-tall acrylic cage covered with a mesh top. Mosquitoes were imprisoned inside, and then jets of water were shot at them to simulate raindrops at terminal velocity. All six of the mosquitos subjected to this ordeal were able to recover from impacts without hitting the floor of the cage.

In most of the collisions, glancing blows sent the mosquitoes spinning away, but even when the insects were hit directly, they only fell about 20 body lengths. Hu proposes that this is due to the insect's low mass compared to the raindrops -- the raindrop imparts little force onto the mosquito because it loses so little speed and momentum. This theory was further tested using small styrofoam spheres, which merely deformed the raindrops that hit them, slowing them down very little.

The high G forces that the insects are subjected to -- up to 300 times gravity -- are the highest ever recorded acceleration that animals have survived, according to Christian Voigt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.

Hu says that he hopes his team's work could have implications for the design of micro-airborne vehicles, used by the military for surveillance. Those approach the size of dragonflies, but Voigt says that flying robots the size of mosquitoes are still some way off.