A ladybug’s hind wings are sturdy enough to keep it in the air for up to two hours and enable it to reach speeds up to 37 miles an hour and altitudes as high as three vertically stacked Empire State Buildings. Yet they fold away with ease. These seemingly contradictory attributes perplexed Kazuya Saito, an aerospace engineer at the University of Tokyo and the lead author of the study.

Working on creating deployable structures like large sails and solar power systems for spacecrafts, he turned to the ladybug for design inspiration.

“Ladybugs seem to be better at flying than other beetles because they repeat takeoff and landing many times in a day,” he wrote in an email message. “I thought their wing should have excellent transformation system.”

Previous research could not explain the intricate folding patterns Dr. Saito observed on the beetle’s hind wings. And studying them was difficult because the elytra stay down and block the view during folding.

“I wanted to know what they actually do under the elytra,” he said.

Through teeny, tiny surgery, Dr. Saito and his colleagues swapped out a colorful top wing with a transparent, artificial one and filmed what happened with high-speed cameras. His team also captured super-detailed 3-D X-ray images. Together these unmasked the puzzling folding patterns.