VI.6 The Flight of a Golf Ball

In a natural environment, insects are constantly being knocked about by wind or visual and mechanical perturbations. And yet they appear to be unperturbed and are able to correct their course with ease. The halteres, mentioned earlier, provide a fast gyroscopic sensor that enables a fruit fly to keep track of its angular rotational rate. Recent work has found that when a fruit fly’s body orientation is perturbed with a torque impulse, it automatically adjusts its wing motion to create a corrective torque. If the perturbation is small, the correction is almost perfect. Exactly how their brains orchestrate this is a question for neural science as well as for mathematical modeling of the whole organism. By examining how insects turn and respond to external perturbations, we can begin to learn about their thoughts.