Zitat des Tages von Michael Dickinson:
There's so many mysteries related to how flies are able to make their way through the world. I'd certainly like to know a lot more about how their brain works. I'd certainly like to know a lot more about just how they're put together. I mean, these animals are basically, topologically, spheres. They don't have bones as we do, of course.
The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it's a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly.
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.
For many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display.
If flies are a great model, they're a great model for flies. These animals, you know, they're not like us. We don't fly. We don't have a compound eye. I don't think we process sensory information the same way. The muscles that they use are just incredibly much more sophisticated and interesting than the muscles we use.
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.
I grew up watching 'Star Trek.' I love 'Star Trek.' 'Star Trek' made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth. And what I do is I study insects.
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.
When you see a fly flitting around your hair or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance. But in my lab, you really see a marvelous machine: arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet.
Although finding fruit flies in your wine or beer can be a bit annoying, I hope people will pause to admire the tenacity of these clever little creatures. They are really just hungry animals looking for something to eat, and have no intention of ruining your happy hour.
