For many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we’ve been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it’s creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
The genus Drosophila is one of the great success stories. There’s hundreds of species within the genus. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, they’re in tropical rain forests, they’re in deserts, they’ve evolved many exotic mating behaviors, and they’re capable of incredibly long-distance flights. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
I’m obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there’d be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
Fly flight is just a great phenomenon to study. It has everything – from the most sophisticated sensory biology; really, really interesting physics; really interesting muscle physiology; really interesting neural computations. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
If flies are a great model, they’re a great model for flies. These animals, you know, they’re not like us. We don’t fly. We don’t have a compound eye. I don’t think we process sensory information the same way. The muscles that they use are just incredibly much more sophisticated and interesting than the muscles we use. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
If you watch a fly on, say, a coffee table, you’ll see that they’re rubbing their little legs together to groom themselves; they’re actually quite clean creatures. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
One of the fastest things a fruit fly does is take information from its eyes and react accordingly. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
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. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
I grew up watching ‘Star Trek.’ I love ‘Star Trek.’ ‘Star Trek’ made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth. And what I do is I study insects. Michael Dickinson Read Quote
We discovered that fruit flies alter course in less than one one-hundredth of a second, 50 times faster than we blink our eyes, which is faster than we ever imagined. Michael Dickinson Read Quote