Scientists discover the best way to swat a fly
Boffins have discovered why flies are so hard to swat, and in doing so they also discovered the prefect way to swat a fly.
The flies brain plans the best way to avoid a good swatting within 100 milliseconds of spotting you looming towards it with a rolled up newspaper say experts from the California Institute of Technology.
Within that time the fly also places its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction, leaving you swatting the table.
Researchers used high-resolution and high-speed cameras to monitor the flies as a graduate student attempted to swat them, says Bioengineering boffin Michael Dickinson.
"We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat," he said.
"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.
"This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose."
Videos showed that if the descending swatter comes from in front of the fly, the fly moves its middle legs forward and leans back, then raises and extends its legs to push off backward.
When the threat comes from the back, however, the fly - which has a nearly 360-degree field of view and can see behind itself - moves its middle legs a tiny bit backwards. With a threat from the side, the fly keeps its middle legs stationary, but leans its whole body in the opposite direction before it jumps.
But the research also suggests an optimal method for actually swatting a fly. "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter," he says.
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My personal favorite method of murdering flies is the two-handed approach, wherein I show one hand to one side of the fly, and smack my hands together, stunning or killing the bugger 80% of the time, even in mid-air, although it is much easier if you wait till it has landed somewhere, since it gives one less angle of escape!
I just spray them with detol... but hay it works!
Meh, those are poor methods. I just fart in the room, shut the door and leave for 2 hours. Often does the trick ;)