Life of science - Flies have an autostabilizing system to achieve stable flight

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Flies have an autostabilizing system to achieve stable flight

Written by Thomas Hesselberg

Saturday, 20 March 2010

A fruit fly in flight showing the special sensory organ, the haltere. Courtesy of the BioFuture Research Group, University of Ulm.

New research published in the PNAS shows that fruit flies employ strategies, similar to modern airplanes, to recover their heading after disturbances. Their results show that these small insects use a combination of passive aerodynamic damping forces and active turning forces to recover their original flight heading to within 2° in less than 60 milliseconds.

Flies have remarkable aerodynamic abilities and as anybody who has ever tried to smash a fly will know, they can change flight direction very fast in response to an approaching stimulus. A new study now finds that the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, has an equally impressive ability to recover from quick flight disturbances

To simulate naturally occurring disturbances caused for instance by wind gusts, scientists from Cornell University in the United States put small magnets on the flies and recorded the free flight of the flies with high speed cameras in a special arena surrounded by magnetic coils. When the flies entered the focal areas of the cameras, an auto-trigger mechanism send an electrical signal to the magnetic coils creating a brief magnetic field, which shifted the orientation of the fruit flies.

From the video recordings the scientists measured flight path, speed and wing movements, which showed that flies reacts to disturbances with a few wing beats and attempt to stop and correct the aerial stumble created by the magnetic disturbance by changing the position and movement of one wing relative to the other member of the pair. This stops the turning by passive aerodynamic damping on the wind and creates an active opposite turning force as well. x

Unlike many insects flies have only one pair of wing and the hind wings have instead evolved into club like sensory organs called halteres that act like gyroscopic sensors. It is these sensory organs that allow the flies to quickly respond to changes in orientation.

Flies therefore have a flight stabilizer that quickly responds to disturbances by recovering the original flight direction. However, the autostabilizing system breaks down if too large disturbances occur causing the flies to select a new flight direction.

Source:
Ristroph, L., Bergou, A. J., Ristroph, G., Coumes, K., Barman, G. J., Guckenheimer, J., Wang, J. and Cohen, I. 2010. Discovering the flight autostabilizer of fruit flies by inducing aerial stumbles. PNAS 107, 4820-4824.

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