Fruit flies can fly up to 15 kilometers in a single trip. That is, six million times the length of your body. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (United States). Also, compared to its body size, it is much more than many species of birds can fly in one day.
Investigation Development
To find out, the scientists conducted experiments in a California lake, releasing flies and luring them into traps containing fermented juice (so they could determine the speed at which they fly). In addition, the researchers installed a weather station to measure wind speed and direction at the release site throughout each experiment. The results of the research were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Thus, to carry out the research, the researchers posed the following question: Do flies behave differently when they are in the wild in search of food? In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of geneticists attempted to address this question by covering hundreds of thousands of flies with fluorescent dust and releasing them outdoors. To the researchers’ surprise, some flies appeared on rotten banana buckets 15 kilometers away the next day.
However, according to Michael Dickinson, professor of Bioengineering and Aeronautics, no one had tried to repeat this experiment, so it was not known exactly how fast the flies fly and how many kilometers they can actually travel.
Study results
The first fruit flies took about 16 minutes to fly one kilometer to reach the traps, which corresponds to a speed of about 1 meter per second. The team found that they were flying at a slightly slower speed (perhaps they had buzzed in circles a little after launch or weren’t flying in a perfectly straight line).
In fact, previous studies have shown that a well-fed fruit fly has enough energy to fly continuously for three hours, being able to reach 15 kilometers in a single flight. In addition, with the help of the wind or a gentle breeze they could go even further . In this way, researchers have been able to conclude that fruit flies travel farther than most migratory birds in a single flight.
Scientific implications
This study has implications in the field of ecology, since it allows us to know how fly populations move around the world. In this way, it is also possible to study and analyze the movement of invasive species that cause significant agricultural damage in many parts of the planet.
