Independently controlled wing stroke patterns in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

ABSTRACT: Flies achieve supreme flight maneuverability through a small set of miniscule steering muscles attached to the wing base. The fast flight maneuvers arise from precisely timed activation of the steering muscles and the resulting subtle modulation of the wing stroke. In addition, slower modulation of wing kinematics arises from changes in the activity of indirect flight muscles in the thorax. We investigated if these modulations can be described as a superposition of a limited number of elementary deformations of the wing stroke that are under independent physiological control. Using a high-speed computer vision system, we recorded the wing motion of tethered flying fruit flies for up to 12,000 consecutive wing strokes at a sampling rate of 6250 Hz. We then decomposed the joint motion patter

SUBMITTER: Chakraborty S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4339832 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature