We have investigated the mechanism of a bristled wing of thrips by using an artificial cantilever-based wing. Five kinds of the artificial bristled wing, which had the similar size of the thrips wing, with a different hair gap were evaluated in a wind tunnel. Experiment results suggested that at low hair-gap-based Reynolds number (<10), the bristled areas of the wing acted as an imaginary airflow block, which increased the aerodynamic force. Meanwhile, this phenomenon did not occur at high Reynolds number (>100).

References :
Ken Sato, Hidetoshi Takahashi, Minh-Dung Nguyen, Kiyoshi Matsumoto, Isao Shimoyama,“Effectiveness of Bristled Wing of Thrips,” The 26th IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS '13), pp. 21 - 24 , Taipei, Taiwan, Jan. 20 - 24, 2013.[Proceedings]