Pages

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Aim for the Escape Route

.




What’s small, annoying, and hard to kill? If you guessed the obvious answer, then you’re absolutely correct. (If you were thinking your little brother, than I’m sorry) I’m talking about those pesky full grown maggots with wings that never die by the slap of the swatter. Killing them is almost impossible. I’ve never had success with killing these insects, so I’ve learned to just deal with them. I never understood why flies were so successful in avoiding the swatter until I read a brief article on Yahoo.

I soon learned that a fly’s brain is wired to dodge the swatter. Whenever a fly senses a possible threat, it instinctively changes their preflight posture to escape in the opposite direction. Flies, I never knew, are pretty smart insects. Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology explained that in just 200 milliseconds, a fly can figure out where a threat is coming from and from there, can set in motion, a set of movements to position legs and wings.

If you swat from the front, the fly will move the middle legs forward, lean back and raise their back legs for a backward take off.

If you’re trying to swing the swatter from the side, be cautioned that the fly has a way to outsmart this. The fly will only lean to the other side and then take off.

To successfully kill a fly, the trick is not to aim for the starting position. Dickinson advises to aim for the escape route.

Source: yahoo news.

0 comments

 

Followers

About Me

My Photo
Kavita (luvikavi)
I am a 25 year old loud mouth by my words yet soft spoken at heart. I have love affairs with new thoughts, ideas, controversies, movies, news,helping those in need and politics. If something tickles my fancy, I will blog profusely about it. The world is filled with nonsense, and writing helps me grasp the reality, whatever that may be.
I graduated from Northern with a Bachelors in Health and Human Sciences, with an emphasis in family and individual development. I hope to GOD my thousand and thousand dollars in loans has prepared me enough for Grad school which I will be venturing off into this Fall of '10. YIKES!
View my complete profile