ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Flying Drosophila stabilize their vision-based velocity controller by sensing wind with their antennae.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sexually Dimorphic Visual Processing in the Yellow-Fever Mosquito,bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Ballistic food approaches inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Flight in the dark: different responses to darkness in flying insects.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Sensory-motor integration in a nonspiking interneuron contributes to active sensor control inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Bridging Biology and Engineering: Unsteady Aerodynamics and Biomimetic Design of Micro Air Vehicles.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Small insects actively respond to updrafts by modulating their wing and body kinematics.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Multisensory integration for active mechanosensation in Drosophila flight.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- A method for mechanically blocking antennal joints in Drosophila.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- How tp1, an indirect wing steering muscle, stabilizesbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Context-dependent effects of carbon dioxide on cross-modal integration during mosquito flight.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Multisensory integration for active mechanosensation inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Moving in an Uncertain World: Robust and Adaptive Control of Locomotion from Organisms to Machine Intelligence.Integrative and comparative biology · 2024Review
- Experiments and Analysis of Mosquito Flight Behaviors in a Wind Tunnel: An Introduction.Cold Spring Harbor protocols · 2024Article
- Asynchronous haltere input drives specific wing and head movements inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Bumblebees compensate for the adverse effects of sidewind during visually guided landings.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Evolution, types, and distribution of flight control devices on wings and elytra in bark beetles.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Flies adaptively control flight to compensate for added inertia.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Lineages to circuits: the developmental and evolutionary architecture of information channels into the central complex.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Review
- Article
- Sensory fusion in the hoverfly righting reflex.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Flies and other insects use vision to regulate their groundspeed in flight, enabling them to fly in varying wind conditions. Compared with mechanosensory modalities, however, vision requires a long processing delay (~100 ms) that might introduce instability if operated at high gain. Flies also sense air motion with their antennae, but how this is used in flight control is unknown. We manipulated the antennal function of fruit flies by ablating their aristae, forcing them to rely on vision alone to regulate groundspeed. Arista-ablated flies in flight exhibited significantly greater groundspeed variability than intact flies. We then subjected them to a series of controlled impulsive wind gusts delivered by an air piston and experimentally manipulated antennae and visual feedback. The results show that an antenna-mediated response alters wing motion to cause flies to accelerate in the same direction as the gust. This response opposes flying into a headwind, but flies regularly fly upwind. To resolve this discrepancy, we obtained a dynamic model of the fly's velocity regulator by fitting parameters of candidate models to our experimental data. The model suggests that the groundspeed variability of arista-ablated flies is the result of unstable feedback oscillations caused by the delay and high gain of visual feedback. The antenna response drives active damping with a shorter delay (~20 ms) to stabilize this regulator, in exchange for increasing the effect of rapid wind disturbances. This provides insight into flies' multimodal sensory feedback architecture and constitutes a previously unknown role for the antennae.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.