Buzz off: Flies have traditionally been difficult to swat, but preempting their crafty behaviour could help to strike them more effectively.
Credit: iStockphoto
Perfecting pre-flight posture
Yet, the experiments hinted that the fly somehow 'knows' whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct pre-flight posture. This means that it must integrate visual information from its eyes with sensory information from its legs, to tell it how to move to get in the optimal pose for take-off.
The results offer new insight into the nervous system of insects, and suggest that within the fly brain there is a map in which the position of the looming threat "is transformed into an appropriate pattern of leg and body motion prior to take off," Dickinson said. "This is a rather sophisticated sensory-to-motor transformation and the search is on to find the place in the brain where this happens."
Handily, the research suggests an optimal method for successfully swatting a fly.
"It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter," suggested Dickinson.
With the California Institute of Technology.
How to swat a fly??
Exactly how much money was spent to discover the life-changing revelation that swatting at where a fly is going to be is more effective than swatting at where it was?
Please tell me that some other more substantial knowledge was gained by this. Please tell me this money wasn't spent just to learn how to swat a fly.
RE: How to swat a fly??
I reckon that this 'attack strategy' was the headline grabber thought up after the event rather than the reason for the research itself. Understanding the intricacies of insect nervous systems has huge potential benefits. Experiments on the visual guidance system of bees for example have informed the development of computer vision methods that will probably eventuate in things like automated transport systems one day soon.
And with summer on the way, its good to have a better idea of how to nail those little suckers too!
Big Bucks Revelation
I agree. I thought the same when I read this article. My husband worked this out years ago. He catches a fly at every attempt!!! Hee Hee!
Very easy to swat a fly if you can move the object it rests on.
I get them every time if I move the object the fly is resting on against another object (hand, surface etc.) Try it and you will be surprised. For some reason the fly does not sense the motion of the object it is resting on.