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The dynamics of height stabilization in Drosophila
Author(s) -
DAVID C. T.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
physiological entomology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.693
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1365-3032
pISSN - 0307-6962
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-3032.1984.tb00778.x
Subject(s) - acceleration , lift (data mining) , biology , dynamics (music) , physics , mechanics , geodesy , geometry , classical mechanics , mathematics , acoustics , geology , data mining , computer science
. Frequency analysis of the height stabilizing system in Drosophila hydei Sturtevant was performed by moving a striped pattern sinusoidally up and down around free‐flying flies. The results show that height is controlled by the flies' vertical acceleration which is set linearly by the velocity of image movement past their eyes in the vertical direction, with a lag of 0.05 s at 25d̀C. No evidence was found of any reaction to the position of the striped pattern relative to the eyes. The gain of the vertical acceleration‐controlling reaction decreased with increasing frequency of visual stimulation. The dynamics of this decrease showed that it was not brought about by an integration step in the movement detector, but was due to the flies reaching the limit to the rate at which they could change their acceleration. The reaction time of the flies decreased with increasing temperature from 0.1 s at 15d̀C to 0.04 s at 30d̀C; the gain of the reaction increasing with temperature. When the vertical acceleration and the vertical velocity were determined every 0.02 s, the acceleration rather than the velocity was proportional to the flies' lift, and they took at least 0.3 s to reach their terminal velocity. This means that the acceleration‐controlling response found here is equivalent to the lift‐controlling responses of tethered flies.