According to Sun Tzu's famous tome The Art of War: "So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battles." When you engage in battle with a house fly, keep the following in mind, so your battles may be successful. When a fly is hanging out on a wall while you plan its demise with a sheet of perforated plastic attached to a metal wand, it is planning how to get away from you. A new study using extremely high speed cameras found that a fly plans its escape a long time—in fly time—before it actually bolts.
According to a new paper published in Current Biology, rather than simply taking off, flies will first calculate where a threat is coming from and prepare its body for a rapid escape. Before taking off to escape, the fly makes a series of changes in its body position. The series of movements seek to position the fly's center-of-mass relative to the legs it will use to jump with. This will allow the force from the legs propel the fly away from the threat.
This research is possible thanks to high speed camera technology, as all of this motion occurs within 200 milliseconds. That's all the time it takes for the fly's brain to identify the response and tell its legs to prep for flight. While a minuscule amount of time, the research showed that this response began over 100 milliseconds before the previously identified first response to a threat. According to Prof. Michael Dickinson, the corresponding author of the paper, "This illustrates how rapidly the fly's brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response."
So next time you hunt that fly that is driving you crazy, keep in mind you have less than 200 milliseconds to sneak up and unleash shock and awe on the nuisance.