Fly on a treadmill demonstrates super direction...( duate student and now is on the researc...)

duate student and now is on the research staff of the Jefferson Headache Center, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia. The fly that evildoers wouldn't want on their wall is a specialist at finding the perfect host for its young. In order to reproduce, female flies must perform the same task as female crickets -- find a male cricket, Hoy and a postdoctoral researcher, Daniel Robert, first reported in Science in 1992. The female flies possess a unique hearing organ that allows them to detect and locate singing male crickets -- where they climb aboard and deposit tiny larvae that develop into larger maggots while feasting on the crickets, from the inside out.

First the flies must locate and home in on the chirping cricket, Hoy notes. But for tactical reasons -- "probably to avoid being kicked off," he says -- the flies usually land close by and walk the last few steps to their unsuspecting host.

This drop-in and tiptoe maneuver gave the Cornell neuroscientists an idea for an experiment: They rigged a swiveling arm with a small speaker to play recorded cricket sounds. On a Ping-Pong ball they painted hundreds of dots so that the ball's position could be tracked by computer, the same way the movement of a computer mouse is tracked. The ball was floated on a jet of air so that it could easily be turned by a walking fly. Then they placed a tethered fly on the ball, turned on the cricket sounds from the speaker and sat back to see what would happen next.

No matter where the sound was directed, to the right or left of center, the fly altered its path to walk directly toward the cricket chirps. Ormia flies, the biologists discovered, can detect changes in sound-source position as small as 2 degrees. Even humans trying to detect who is speaking in a crowded room can't do better than that.

"When you consider the size difference between humans and flies, Ormia flies are the real champions," Hoy says, describing a mechanical link
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Contact: Roger Segelken
hrs2@cornell.edu
607-255-9736
Cornell University News Service
4-Apr-2001

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