Fruit Fly Aerial Maneuver Explained

To study insect maneuvers, Jane Wang and Itai Cohen of Cornell University and their colleagues put several flies in a chamber that was illuminated from three perpendicular directions by bright projectors. When a fly passed through a pair of crossed laser beams, three high-resolution cameras were triggered to film at 8000 frames per second. Each camera recorded the fly’s shadow from one of the projectors. A new computer algorithm developed by the group automatically combined the two-dimensional silhouettes into a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fly.