Most people have had the annoying experience of attempting to swat a fly, only for it to almost magically dodge aside and avoid being struck.
Img: Fruit fly. Credit: julie_g/flickr
Now U.S. researchers have come up with the reason why flies are so competent at avoiding death by swatting; its all to do with anticipation and exceptionally fast footwork.
Research led by Michael Dickinson, the Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), using high-resolution, high-speed digital imaging of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) found the flies' brain locates the arriving threat (the swatter), calculates the best escape route and places its legs in the best position to escape.
This remarkable series of events occurs within about 100 milliseconds after the fly first spots the swatter, say the researchers.
"This illustrates how rapidly the fly's brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response," Dickinson says. "We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat."
"When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly's body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow 'knows' whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture.""This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose," says Dickinson.
The paper titled "Visually Mediated Motor Planning in the Escape Response of Drosophila," is published on August 28 in the journal Current Biology.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
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