Defining Mammalian Climbing Gaits and their influence criteria including morphology and mechanics

2024

Miscellaneous

hi

In comparison to terrestrial locomotion, climbing presents a couple unique challenges. First, organisms must move upwards, meaning they lack a “restoring force” to bring them back into contact with the climbing surface as they continuously overcome gravitational forces. Second, organisms must possess morphology capable of gripping the climbing surface and perform appropriate contact patterns to prevent falling. While recent studies have examined climbing via van der Waals forces and capillary adhesion, these are often limited to non-mammalian species less than 500 grams. Even amongst the studies for mammals, many are focused on primates, which take advantage of highly specialized opposable thumbs, elongated digits, and/or prehensile tails. Despite the phylogenetic diversity of mammalian climbers, basic concepts like climbing gaits are still limited to insects, primates, and robots. In this work, we attempt to translate the foundational descriptions of terrestrial gaits, e.g. horses trotting, to mammalian climbing gaits. We performed kinematics analyses to identify common mammalian climbing gaits and discerned some underlying criteria influencing these gaits. Due to the aforementioned biomechanical constraints specific to climbing, we predict non-primate, mammalian climbing gaits will all fall within and occupy a smaller subspace of the known terrestrial gaits described by Hildebrand.

@misc{Shriver24-SICB-climbing,
  title = {Defining Mammalian Climbing Gaits and their influence criteria including morphology and mechanics},
  author = {Shriver, Cassie and Schulz, Andrew and Scott, Dylan and Elgart, Jennifer and Mendelson, Joseph and Hu, David and Chang, Young-Hui},
  booktitle = {Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology},
  address = {Seattle, USA},
  month = jan,
  year = {2024},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {1}
}