The fact that flies are airborne acrobats should not surprise anyone who has ever swung a flyswatter at one, but scientists using video cameras to track a fly's aerial maneuvers found they employ astonishingly quick midair banked turns to evade predators much like a fighter jet executes to elude an enemy.
Their study, published Thursday in the journal Science, documents aerial agility in fruit flies such as the capacity to begin to change course in less than a hundredth of a second.
The researchers at the University of Washington synchronized three high-speed cameras operating at 7,500 frames per second to learn how the flies make themselves so elusive. They tracked the midair wing and body motions of the fruit fly species Drosophila hydei, which is about the size of a sesame seed, after the insects were shown an image that suggested an approaching predator.