Why are flies so fast? what causes them to have such a high reaction time to events going on around them? Is it merely because the electrons travelling across their nervous system have less of a distance to travel? (I would think that this be irrelevant since the speed of electricity would be almost exactly the same over such small relative distances.)
In addition, please excuse me for my deluge of initial posts. These are questions I have accumulated over the past year that I haven’t been able to find any decent answers to. Thanks in advance for everyone’s input.
The metabolic activity of the flight muscles have nothing to do with fly r4eation times. The muscles manage to be so damn active because they don’t rely on nerve impulses to contract as do our own muscles. Instead they become self-cycling once they are contracted and they need to then be actively stopped. That means they can run a hell of a lot faster then the muscles of most others animals and hence chew a lot more energy, but they still react at exactly the same speed.
Flies don’t really react any faster than humans or any other animals. It might appear that way because they are so small but realistically their muscles and nerves still respond to stimuli at the same rate.
Part of the reason they seem so fast is that so much of what they do is reflexive. That saves a bit of time because the ‘brain’ doesn’t need to waste time processing the data. But comparing fly reflexes to something like the blink reflex in humans gives about the same reaction speed.
Another important point is that they can respond to stimuli that humans can’t detect. A fly often appears to be moving fast because it reflexively moves when it detects a change in air currents from a swatter. We think it saw the swatter coming and dodged whereas in reality it had far more warning then that. But to put that in perspective try hitting a trained boxer or martial artist with a flyswatter before they can react. You will have absolutely no more success than you will with a fly. The reaction times remain comparable so long as the threat is detected.
If you want to nail flies with a fly swatter try aiming directly behind them.
The fly does a sort of backward somersault to take off, this helps it avoid anything heading straight for it.
Well I never said I wasn’t successful in hitting flies! As a matter of fact, over the years I have trained myself to be able to catch them alive in my hand (and then proceed to banishing them to the torture chamber). But I understand the point you were making, just poking fun.
But I understand the point you were making, just poking fun.