Why We Can’t Hit Flies With A Swatter
Posted by supercynic on August 30, 2008
Read this article and let me know if you had the same concluding thought as I did. I simply cut and pasted this straight from CNN’s website because I didn’t want to leave out any of the crucial details.
Quick-witted flies can ‘detect swatter threat’
(CNN) — Flies always appear to be a step ahead of the swatter. And now scientists believe they know why.
New research shows flies rapidly calculate an escape route once they spot a swatter.
According to new research published in the journal Current Biology, flies have a quick-fire intelligence and are good at planning ahead.
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) filmed experiments using fruit flies and a swatter.
They discovered that flies quickly calculated the location of the threat and an escape plan.
Within 100 milliseconds of spotting the swatter they could move their bodies into a position that allowed an extension of the legs to save them.
Caltech Professor Michael Dickinson, who lead the study, said in the journal that it showed how rapidly a fly’s brain processed sensory information.
“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,” Dickinson said.
“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.”
And Dickinson had some advice on how to successfully swat the lightning limbed insects.
“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,” he said.
Source: Quick-witted flies can ‘detect swatter threat’ – CNN.com.
My concluding thought: You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Sorry for the foul language, but a bunch of scientists standing around a lab swatting flies? “It’s 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”????? How the hell can I anticipate where a fly is going to jump unless I’ve got it cornered? If the damn thing is just hanging out on the wall or on a table — like 99.9% of the flies that I’ve encountered in life are — he could “jump” in pretty much any direction.
Sorry all you folks with uncured diseases. We’ve been hammering away at the secret behind the illusive nature of the housefly. Our discovery? You gotta lead ‘em a little.
