“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. The findings, published in the journal Science, shed light on these tiny critters’ remarkable ability to evade predators (and fly swatters). In response, the flies quickly executed their escape maneuvers, which the scientists were able to capture on camera. 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. 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. 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. 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.
– 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."