Author

It is difficult, but intriguing, to imagine seeing the world as a fly might. First, flies don't have nearly the same visual resolution that we do... so you have to imagine a fuzzier image. Second, fly eyes are faster than our own and are very sensitive to motion.

From Michael Dickinson

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.

From Michael Dickinson

If you watch a fly on, say, a coffee table, you'll see that they're rubbing their little legs together to groom themselves; they're actually quite clean creatures.

From Michael Dickinson

The fruit flies we work with have the equivalent of about a 25 by 25 pixel camera. But that camera is very, very fast, about 10 times faster than the human visual system.

From Michael Dickinson

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.

From 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.

From Michael Dickinson

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.

From Michael Dickinson

One of the fastest things a fruit fly does is take information from its eyes and react accordingly.

From Michael Dickinson

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.

From Michael Dickinson

When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly's body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow 'knows' whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture.

From Michael Dickinson

Michael Dickinson

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