Fly-O-Rama!

Ultimately Dickinson hopes to take everything he's learned about how flies fly and apply it to an even bigger question: how insect flight evolved. Insects probably developed wings from body scales more than 300 million years ago. Wings were the secret to their success-flying insects make up the vast majority of all known animal species on Earth. Since the origin of flight, insects have fine-tuned their anatomy to accommodate a range of flying styles, from the broad gliding wings of dragonflies to the fierce fighter-jet attacks of wasps. "You have to understand the mechanism before you can understand how behavior evolves," says Dickinson.




But it is hard for Dickinson to imagine the day when he will have answered all his questions. "The more we study fly flight, the more we realize how little we understand," he says.




A case in point: After making the rounds to see how his students are doing, Dickinson comes back to his office, where Mark Frye, a post-doctoral fellow in the lab, wants his help. Frye is writing a computer program to simulate an airborne fruit fly-essentially a dry run for Flyball. The simulated fly takes a path through a simulated arena, using the decision rules the team has put together. But it's not working.




"If I only let them turn in one direction, it works great," Frye says. But if he lets the simulated flies choose which way to turn, the results go haywire.




Dickinson offers some suggestions-perhaps make the insect respond not just to what's right in front of it but also to what it saw a few moments earlier. They try to work out how Frye might turn that into a program, and after a while they fall silent, both a little exasperated. Then Frye utters three words that are something of a motto of Dickinson's team, and often can be found scribbled on blackboards around the lab:




"Little (expletive) robots."




Dickinson smiles and repeats the sentiment: "Little (expletive) robots." These apparently simple creatures that, neurologically speaking, amount to little more than a few circuits, still manage to confound him at every pass. But in truth Dickinson's motto is a term of affection. "Flies are wondrous things," he says. "Probably every human on the planet sees at least one fly a day, and yet we don't even notice them. Right under our noses are these extraordinary little machines."

Carl Zimmer's books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. He's currently at work on a book about the origins of neurology in the 1600s.