Why is it so hard to swat a fly?
The insects adjust their position at the mere hint of a threat, finding shows CHICAGO – The brains of flies are wired to avoid the swatter, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. At the mere hint of a threat, the insects adjust their preflight stance to flee in the opposite direction, ensuring a clean getaway, they said in a finding that helps explain why flies so easily evade swipes from their human foes. “These movements are made very rapidly, within about 200 milliseconds, but within that time the animal determines where the threat is coming from and activates an appropriate set of movements to position its legs and wings,” Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology said in a statement. “This illustrates how rapidly the fly’s brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response,” said Dickinson, whose research appears in the journal Current Biology. Dickinson’s team studied this process in fruit flies using high-speed digital imaging equipment and a
Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to catch a fly, even if you’re using a fly-swatter? A new study being done at Cal Tech University shows that flies’ brains, as small as they are, are often a few seconds ahead of the human hand. George Lewis has more in tonight’s closer look. It is one of life’s great frustrations – swatting flies. Every time you spot one and try to get it, it seems to get away. Now, a team of researchers at Cal Tech University has figured out why. Down in the basement in an out-of-the-way laboratory, Dr. Michael Dickinson has been studying how flies flee when they’re threatened. Using super-slow-motion cameras at 1/200th of normal speed, he’s found their little brains are quite adept at coordinating evasive manuevers. Michael Dickinson: “They’re actually jumping away from our swatter because they take the time to plan their escape.” …An escape plan that the fly’s brain can calculate in under 1/10th of a second. Michael Dickinson: “When the fly first sees the s
You may think you know how to swat a fly, but Michael Dickinson’s work could teach you a thing or two. Dickinson used superslow-motion video cameras to study how a fly avoids getting swatted. First, he and his graduate student Gwyneth Card coaxed the fly to stand on a glass prism anchored to the middle of a small moat. The prism let him see the fly from below and the side simultaneously. Then, he moved a kind of mini fly swatter toward the fly and recorded how the fly reacted. Dickinson says a fly will typically jump off the surface and then begin to fly away from the swatter. But the high-speed cameras revealed something amazing about what happened before the fly jumped. “They perform an elegant little ballet with their legs,” says Dickinson. “They move their legs around to reposition their bodies so that when they do jump, they will push themselves away from the looming threat.” That ballet appears to give them a critical edge in escaping the swatter. Dickinson says what’s remarkable
