text: Once they sense danger, fruit flies can pitch their bodies like a fighter jet during flight, rolling almost upside down in order to shift momentum and speed to avoid a oncoming threat, new research shows. 
   
   “We discovered that fruit flies alter course in less than one one-hundredth of a second, 50 times faster than we blink our eyes, which is faster than we ever imagined.” Michael Dickinson, UW professor of biology and co-author of the paper about these findings, said in a news release. 
   
   In his lab, Dickinson and other researchers have found that evasive maneuvers performed by fruit flies, also known as Drosophila hydei, are very similar to those of a fighter jet. His research will be published in the April 11 issue of Science. 
   
   Escape Maneuver in a Flying Fly from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
   
   More like a plane than a boat 
   
   “One of the fastest things a fruit fly does is take information from its eyes and react accordingly,” Dickinson said. 
   
   Previous research suggested that flies would turn like a boat would, Dickinson said, but this new research has shown that they can pitch their body and perform banked turns much like a plane would. 
   
   “They do this with remarkably subtle changes in wing movement,” Dickinson told us. 
   
   Florian Muijres, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher, said that it’s both the speed and accuracy of the flies that they have found impressive. 
   
   “What we have found is that these flies are fast and accurate in their response,” Muijres said. 
   
   According to Muijres, the flies can roll almost completely upside down while flying thanks to the incredible speed at which they flap their wings. 
   
   “These flies normally flap their wings 200 times a second and, in almost a single wing beat, the animal can reorient its body to generate a force away from the threatening stimulus and then continues to accelerate,” Muijres said in the UW release. 
   
   The fly’s brain may be small, but it’s very dense with neurons. Muijres said a fly’s brain is actually more dense than a human brain. The mystery of how these little creatures are able to perform such amazing feats is still pushing the researchers at UW forward with their research. 
   
   “We have the input and the output and now we are looking at how the input translates into the output,” Muijres said. 
   
   Using tech to slow down time 
   
   UW researchers used three high speed cameras to accurately capture the flies’ movements in a 20-by-20 centimeter flight arena. They used an expanding shadow effect to make the fly take evasive action, and the cameras recorded the action at 7,500 frames per second. 
   
   Escape Maneuver Fly SetupNrobofly from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
   
   Because the camera shutters were opening and closing every one thirty-thousandth of a second, they need to light the flight arena so the cameras would be able to get the footage. Dickinson said they used infra-red light in order to light the space for the cameras without blinding the flies in the process. 
   
   “When the flies would go through the focus of all three cameras is when we would start recording,” Dickinson said. 
   
   Once the measurements and video were recorded, the scientists were able to replicate the fly’s movement on a robot fly model. 
   
   “We are able to take the measurements and replay them on the robot and directly measure the forces the wings were generating,” Dickinson said. 
   
   Amazing brains 
   
   Dickinson said a fruit fly’s brain performs very complicated calculations in a split second, an amazing level of calculation for something so small. 
   
   “How can such a small brain generate so many remarkable behaviors? A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That’s a super interesting problem from an engineering perspective,” Dickinson said in a news release. 
   
   Check out some more videos of the fruit fly in action: 
   
   Escape Maneuver FlyModel from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
   
   Escape Maneuver Fly Topview from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
   
   Escape Maneuver in Fly #2 from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
   
   Break out your 3D glasses for this one: 
   
   Escape Maneuver FlyModel 3D from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. ||||| Fruit flies could make some talented fighter pilots. Scientists who had the insects wing it through two laser beams watched the bugs make hairpin turns at blazing fast speeds, by banking in the same way that fighter jet planes do. The findings, published in the journal Science, shed light on these tiny critters’ remarkable ability to evade predators (and fly swatters). 
   
   [Updated at 5:15 p.m. PDT April 10: Tracking how these insects fly in response to a threat should help researchers understand the fruit fly's inner life, said Cornell University physicist Jane Wang, who was not involved in the research. 
   
   "The insects turn because they have some internal control circuitry, just like a pilot [who's] turning a plane," Wang said. "And by looking how the insects turn, we might be able to say what the 'pilot' is thinking."] 
   
   When trying to escape from a threat, the Drosophila hydei flies turn at a speed that’s five times faster than their normal turning speed, according to researchers from the University of Washington. Instead of turning right or left on the "yaw" axis, like a boat in the water, the flies execute banked turns, by rolling and pitching their bodies at the same time, which supercharges their turns. They can execute one of these within less than one hundredth of a second after seeing a threat, the scientists said. That’s 50 times faster than the blink of an eye. 
   
   “A lot of other people working in the field … would not have predicted the fly could rotate itself so quickly,” said study coauthor Michael Dickinson, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. 
   
   Dickinson and his colleagues captured 3,566 wing beats involved in 92 separate fruit fly escapes, which was no easy task. To capture such infinitesimally tiny movements, the scientists had to use high-speed cameras that took 7,500 frames per second -- that’s nearly 40 frames for each wing beat. They also needed flood the flight area with light to capture the motions in high detail -- but all that light would blind the flies, which wouldn’t be able to maneuver. 
   
   Instead, they had to use infrared light, whose wavelength is too long for human or fly eyes to pick up on. All the circuitry in those lights generated so much heat that the scientists had to run an air conditioner in the laboratory, forcing the researchers to dress warmly in already chilly Seattle weather. 
   
   There were, Dickinson said, “a whole lot of wool hats worn in the lab.” 
   
   The scientists watched the flies fly through two crossing laser beams, causing their own shadow to loom large like an impending threat. In response, the flies quickly executed their escape maneuvers, which the scientists were able to capture on camera. 
   
   The videos showed that the flies could roll to one side by 90 degrees or even more as they made these turns, almost bringing them upside down. And they could make these turns in less than two wing beats -- which is pretty remarkable, given that they typically flap their wings at 200 times per second, the scientists said. 
   
   “So it’d kind of be like a jet fighter pilot with a stick in his or her hand, only had to make a little bit of tiny change in the stick and pshooo, the plane goes off,” Dickinson said. “So we’re very interested in how the brain can control motion on such a fine scale.” 
   
   With all this high quality data, the scientists were able to pull out mathematical rules that governed the flies’ decisions on how to make a banked turn, and they then programmed them into a robotic fly that they tested in flowing mineral oil. (Because the robot was much bigger than the flies, the scientists had to adjust the viscosity of the fluid they were "flying" through so the physics would stay about the same, the scientists said.) 
   
   The next step, Dickinson said, is to understand the complex neural circuitry linked to the flight muscles that makes these daring maneuvers possible. 
   
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target: – Swatting a fruit fly is as tricky as trying to catch a tiny fighter jet with an expert pilot at the controls, researchers say. High-speed cameras captured the insects avoiding threats by executing supercharged, banked turns much like fighter planes, reports the Los Angeles Times. The flies beat their wings 200 times per second and were capable of altering course in a single wingbeat, performing complex calculations incredibly quickly for a creature with only a tiny speck of a brain. The University of Washington team plans further research to determine how the flies are able to perform such amazing feats in the air, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse," one of the researchers says. "That’s a super interesting problem from an engineering perspective."