Escape Behavior of Fly in Response to Looming Visual Stimulu

Video from the paper "Visually Mediated Motor Planning in the Escape Response of Drosophila" by Gwyneth Card and Michael H. Dickinson, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2008.07.094.

High-speed video camera is used to capture the motion of fruit flies in response to a 14-cm-diameter black disk that fell toward the animals along a 50° downward trajectory. Individual flies were loaded into small opaque vials from which they climbed through a narrow tube onto the center of a 5 × 5 mm2 platform. We triggered the descent of the black disk and started video capture once a fly had settled on the horizontal surface of the platform. Ninety-six percent of the flies responded to the descending disk by jumping into the air and initiating flight. A typical escape sequence is shown in the movie. The mean delay between the start of the stimulus and the onset of flight (measured by the loss of tarsal contact of the mesothoracic legs) was 215 ms ± 42 ms (mean ± SD). Because we do not know when the flies first notice the stimulus, this value represents an upper limit on the time window, within which all of the sensory-motor processing for the escape behavior occurs.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• biology
• ethology
• drosophila