Each winter semester, the lab offers a lecture on "Locomotion in Animals". The lecture is held in German and deals with the mechanisms of how animals move. We start with locomotion of singe cells and the flagellum as an universal device for propulsion. Further aspects cover the function of muscle tissue in vertebrates and invertebrates and the various forms of how animals move in water. The lecture also shows how animals fly and how flight evolved in birds. We explain why running animals change their locomotor gaits when changing running speed and why astronauts jump on the moon. The lecture is illustrated by several videos of moving animals.

This practical course deals with visual motion processing in insects. We will use the landing response of fruit flies Drosophila to study how the vision system of insects processes visual information in flight. Computer-generated moving patterns are used for visual stimulation of tethered flying animals. An introduction into a numerical model of the Elementary-Motion-Detector (EMD) of the insect eye will complete the course.