Fruit flies correct midair rolls in milliseconds

Researchers who study fruit flies to gain insight into in-flight stabilization have uncovered a particular detail on how these insects right themselves during a midair roll. Postdoctoral fellow Tsevi Beatus, working with Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and John Guckenheimer, professor of mathematics, have discovered that flies stabilize themselves during flight using a control reflex that's among the fastest in the animal kingdom. Their results were published March 11 in Royal Society Interface. Flapping flight inherently is unstable, and insects must constantly be correcting these instabilities, including the in-flight roll, or rotation along the long body axis. Without a control mechanism for this movement, the insect would roll over and crash within just a few wing beats, the researchers say. A fruit fly does a roll and correction. The three sides of the 3-D box show movies from high-speed cameras, and the 3D-rendered fly represents kinematic data of the body and wing positions in each frame.