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First published online November 30, 2007
Journal of Experimental Biology 210, 4319-4334 (2007)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2007
doi: 10.1242/jeb.010389

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Turning behaviour depends on frictional damping in the fruit fly Drosophila

Thomas Hesselberg and Fritz-Olaf Lehmann^*

Biofuture Research Group, Institute of Neurobiology, University of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 11, 89081 Ulm, Germany

^* Author for correspondence (e-mail: fritz.lehmann{at}uni-ulm.de)

Accepted 16 October 2007

Turning behaviour in the fruit fly Drosophila depends on several factors including not only feedback from sensory organs and muscular control of wing motion, but also the mass moments of inertia and the frictional damping coefficient of the rotating body. In the present study we evaluate the significance of body friction for yaw turning and thus the limits of visually mediated flight control in Drosophila, by scoring tethered flies flying in a flight simulator on their ability to visually compensate a bias on a moving object and a visual background panorama at different simulated frictional dampings. We estimated the fly's natural damping coefficient from a numerical aerodynamic model based on both friction on the body and the flapping wings during saccadic turning. The model predicts a coefficient of 54x10^–12 Nm s, which is more than 100-times larger than the value estimated from a previous study on the body alone. Our estimate suggests that friction plays a larger role for yaw turning in Drosophila than moments of inertia. The simulator experiments showed that visual performance of the fruit fly collapses near the physical conditions estimated for freely flying animals, which is consistent with the suggested role of the halteres for flight stabilization. However, kinematic analyses indicate that the measured loss of flight control might be due predominantly to the limited fine control in the fly's steering muscles below a threshold of 1–2° stroke amplitude, rather than resulting from the limits of visual motion detection by the fly's compound eyes. We discuss the impact of these results and suggest that the elevated frictional coefficient permits freely flying fruit flies to passively terminate rotational body movements without producing counter-torque during the second half of the saccadic turning manoeuvre.

Key words: flight control, flight saccade, visual system, body friction, steering capacity

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