How a Blowfly Flies, Viewed from Inside

This awesome bit of nature porn lets you dive right inside a blowfly and watch its flight mechanisms in action—and like any modern-day blockbuster, it’s even in 3D.

The videos were published as part of a new paper in PLOS Biology, for which researchers used a powerful type of X-ray to reveal how each muscle and hinge mechanism in the fly’s tiny body work to keep it buzzing around with sometimes annoyingly speedy twists and turns. The different muscles are colour-coded in the video above, which shows the motion scaled up and slowed down.

“A blowfly's wingbeat is 50 times shorter than a blink of a human eye, and is controlled by numerous tiny steering muscles—some of which are as thin as a human hair,” the authors wrote in the paper, which gives an idea of quite how difficult it was to capture this sort of movement, and why it's a real breakthrough in the field.

Unsurprisingly, the X-ray technique they used was a little more complex than the kind you might be used to seeing in a hospital. In fact, the work had to be done using a particle accelerator—a synchrotron called the Swiss Light Source at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. Called “time-resolved X-ray microtomography,” the imaging technique captured cross sections of the living fly doing its thing to a resolution of micrometres, and these were then combined  to create the dynamic model.

Because the researchers wanted to see how the fly made turns, they induced it to steer by spinning it around. They “tethered” blowflies to a turntable (which a primer on the paper explains usually means gluing them to a rod) and rotated them in the synchrotron’s X-ray beam; when they were being spun, the flies tried to turn in the other direction, with gave the researchers chance to explore their steering mechanisms.

“We found that blowflies have evolved a mechanism rather like the differential in a car; whilst the power delivered to the fly's wings on each side remains the same, the fly effectively 'brakes' on one side by diverting excess power into a steering muscle specialized to absorb mechanical energy,” explained Oxford University researcher Graham Taylor in a statement.

As well as decoding the mysteries of what one of the authors described as “probably the most complex joint in nature,” the investigation into the blowfly’s flight mechanisms will likely inspire future micro air vehicles—i.e. micro-drones.

We’ve seen teensy-tiny insect-aping drones before in the likes of the dime-sized RoboBee and the dragonfly-like DelFly Explorer, but for all their technological prowess, their movements are nowhere near as zippy as their equivalents in nature just yet.

But in the future, it looks like we might just need some more high-tech fly swats.