The Kid Should See This

Somersaulting fly captured in award-winning slow motion video

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Dear Hummingbirds, you are amazing in the air. But it looks like this fly has at least one trick up its sleeve: aΒ somersault. And it won an award for it, too:

The move is seldom observed in real time due to its speed, butΒ Joris SchaapΒ and Emile van Wijk managed to capture the behaviour using a high-speed camera. The escape manoeuvre is performed when a fly is taken by surprise, allowing it to regain control during the tumble.

The same behaviour in fruit flies has been observed in the lab by biologistsΒ Michael DickinsonΒ from the University of Washington andΒ Gwyneth CardΒ from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dickinson and Card typically study fruit flies in flight, for exampleΒ to find out more about wing dynamicsΒ and how the brain translates decisions into motion.

The short film is one of the winners in a competition organised by theΒ Flight Artists groupΒ at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The team taught amateur filmmakers how to use high-speed cameras to capture flying animals, or plant seeds, and selected the best results.

Flight Artists has a huge collection of slow motion flying creatures including this white dove,Β this red admiral butterfly, and this hovering robin.

And previously here: hummingbirds, owls,Β pollinators,Β and the northern goshawk.


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