What exactly makes flies so damn fast? What are the factors that determine reaction time in different species of animals?
They’ve got a very wide field of vision and fairly skittish reflexes. They’re not particularly fast; they are just good at spotting threats early and getting the hell out of the way (or changing direction) quickly.
This is also why some people hang bags of water to repel flies… being a convex refractor, a bag of water creates the illusion of motion convincing enough to spook a passing housefly, thus they avoid the area. Pretty much, only flies are dumb enough to fall for this.
they are not that fast, just not headed where you think they are going. The common house fly does not go from sitting on your table to forward flight. He does the opposite. He actually jumps to the rear. Aim your swat a bit to the back and you will clobber the little sucker. Aim ahead of him and you will miss almost all the time.
The ability of flies to beat their wings so fast has long puzzled scientists. Their unsophisticated brains plainly don’t have the required horsepower to beat their wings at the necessary speed. However, a few years ago, the puzzle was solved. As it turns out, the muscles that beat a fly’s wings are on all the time. When, say, the muscles that pull a fly’s wings down contract, the muscles that lift the fly’s wings up are stretched. This stretching causes reflexive contraction of the stretched muscle (human muscle does this too, but the effect is much weaker). The fly’s wings raise, then the pulldown muscles stretch. The cycle begins again and because the action is reflexive, the fly’s brain is not need to cause it to fly.
So how does the fly stop? Scientists are unsure, exactly, but there is plainly some sort of inhibitory mechanism that the fly must manipulate in order to stop (as well as maneuver).
I stick to my post, while Malienation’s most exellent post describes the engineering of the whole sordid mess, it does not help you swat the little buggers out of existance. Aim an inch or two to the rear and let the body count build up.
The physical size of an animal is a limiting factor. Nerve impulses are transmitted via the movements of in nerve cells; the signals only travel at about 100 meters per second, sometimes less. This means that in a large animal like a person where signals might make a round trip of a meter or two, you are talking at least several milliseconds; that doesn’t even allow any time for the brain to think about how to respond.
Since flies are so small, the nerve signals don’t have far to travel; and since their nervous systems are so simple they don’t waste time thinking about how they should react.
:smack: That should be movements of IONS in nerve cells.