Despite their minuscule eyes and a brain roughly 1 million times smaller than yours, flies can evade almost every swat. Here's why. (via ConversationUS)
, with the goal of finding out how such tiny creatures can process visual information to perform challenging behaviors, such as escaping your swatter so quickly.Flies have compound eyes. Rather than collecting light through a single lens that makes the whole image–the strategy of human eyes–flies form images built from multiple, lots of individual lenses that focus incoming light onto clusters of photoreceptors, the light-sensing cells in their eyes.
A fly’s world is fairly low resolution, because small heads can house only a limited number of facets–usually–and there is no easy way to sharpen their blurry vision up to the millions of pixels people effectively see. But despite this coarse resolution, flies see and process fast movements very quickly.
We can infer how animals perceive fast movement from how quickly their photoreceptors can process light. Humans discern a maximum ofof light per second. Any faster usually appears as steady light. The ability to see discrete flashes depends on the lighting conditions and which part of the retina you use.
Some LED lights, for example, emit discrete flashes of light quickly enough that they appear as steady light to humans–unless you turn your head. In your peripheral vision you may notice a flicker. That’s because your peripheral vision processes light more quickly, but at a lower resolution, like fly vision., around four times more flashes per second than people can perceive.
If you took one of these flies to the cineplex, the smooth movie you watched made up of 24 frames per second would, to the fly, appear as a series of static images, like a slide show. But this fast vision allows it to react quickly to prey, obstacles, competitors and your attempts at swatting.
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