From owner-drosophila@net.bio.net Fri Oct 27 22:00:00 1995
Path: biosci!CB.CSHL.ORG!marr
From: marr@CB.CSHL.ORG
Newsgroups: bionet.drosophila
Subject: Re: How do flies land on the ceiling ?
Date: 28 Oct 1995 09:02:36 -0700
Organization: BIOSCI International Newsgroups for Molecular Biology
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Message-ID: <199510281601.MAA03574@dakini.cb.cshl.org>
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>In article <46bhds$svd@cri.ens-lyon.fr>,
>   jmfriedt@ens-lyon.fr (Jean-Michel Friedt) wrote:
>>Im sorry do disturb you, im not even sure if these are the right newsgroups
>>to ask this :
>>
>>I have been looking for quite a while now at how flies land on the ceiling.
>>I mean flies fly head up but land on the ceiling with their head toward the
>>floor ... I've been wondering how they turn around from the head-up position
>>to the head down position (no I am NOT crazy, i am just a physicist :).
>>So what i am looking for would be a movie/video/pictures of flying insects
>>landing in positions as different as possible from their flying position.
>>I would be very happy if someone can answer me, and excuse me for my bad
>>english. Thank you, Jean-Michel FRIEDT.
>>
>>
>
>"They somersault.  They fly along very close to the ceiling, reach
>up with their front feet, grab hold, and flip over."
>
>That's quoting my own little book, "The Fly in Your Eye".  I wrote
>it in 1989 and don't remember where I got the information, but
>the whole text was checked by the Entomology Division of the
>CSIRO in Australia, so it's correct.  Any flies in Australia
>that do it differently are severely punished.
>
>Jim Heath
>


Do they flip in the same direction most of the time? Do they flip
in the opposite direction in the northern hemisphere? And finally,
by "severly punished" do you mean "squashed", hence providing strong
selection pressure to skew the allele frequency towards conformists?




.