“The flies start turning away from approaching threats in half the time it takes you to start blinking at a camera flash, and finish throttling up their flight motor in one-fiftieth of the time it takes you to complete the blink. It is little wonder we find them hard to swat.”                                        [Professor Graham Taylor, Oxford University]

Another fascinating excerpt — this time from Prof. Michael Dickinson of Washington University, Seattle — is: “…they can fly like an ace at birth. It’s like putting a newborn baby in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft and it knowing what to do.”

Read the full article (with video), from the BBC, at: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26943442