Having a fruit fly ball buzz around your head is fairly annoying , and ending up in a cult - induced swat - fest is n’t that unusual . alas , the fly always seems to be a few steps ahead of you and the swatting is n’t as successful as you ’d like it to be . How do they manage to do it ? According to a young study from investigator at the University of Washington led by Michael Dickinson , the tent flap have evasive maneuvers similar to a attack aircraft honey oil . The results of the written report were release inScience .
Fruit flies are incredibly fast . The species hit the books by the team , Drosophila hydei , are able to flap their wings at about 200 beats per mo . Under ordinary circumstances , the fly just changes its heading to vary direction . But when it is frightened , it is capable to execute banked turns five times faster than it normally make a motion .
In order tostudy the fruit fly ’ movements , 50 of them were put inside a drum and tape with photographic camera that captured them at 7500 frames per moment ( this means that the camera ’s shutter open and closed every thirty - thousandth of a second ) . seeable igniter bright enough to allow the camera to work would have blinded the flies , so the team had to use infrared , which the fly are unable to show .
Two optical maser lights were criss - sweep in the drum so when the fly fly through that light , it produced a moody shadow on the internal wall near it . The sudden show of the shadow jump the fly , do it to go into a panicked hairpin U - turning .
to study the turning itself , the researchers repress the motion picture ’s playback amphetamine by 300x . A 3D computer modelling was make to admit the scientist to see additional details of the fly ’s consistency positioning as it recognise and responds to the stimulus . “ We distinguish that yield flies vary naturally in less than one one - one percent of a 2d , 50 times faster than we blink our eye , ” Dickinson explained in apress release , “ which is faster than we ever ideate . ”
“ How can such a small brain generate so many singular behaviors ? A fly with a brain the sizing of a common salt food grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much big beast such as a shiner , ” Dickinson proceed . “ That ’s a extremely interesting problem from an engineering view . ” The next step in this inquiry will be to set which parts of the Einstein control the heftiness in club to execute this animation - carry through maneuver so apace .
