Meeting Abstract
Fruit flies are a model system for animal flight studies from the perspective of muscle physiology, sensory control, flight dynamics and fluid mechanics. Their flight is often described as bouts of straight trajectories punctuated with saccadic turns, although more recent studies have shown their behavioural repertoires to be more diverse. We characterised the typical free-flight behavioural modes of flies as they explored an arena. These modes were identified by a clustering analysis that objectively revealed the combinations of translational and rotational velocities and accelerations of the body that were most commonly observed. Once the collection of principal behaviours had been identified, we looked in more detail at the symmetric and asymmetric wingbeat kinematics that effected those motions. We used an automated algorithm based on voxel carving that allowed for a large sample size to be collected that included information on the twisting of the wings during each stroke cycle. The wingbeat kinematics associated with each mode we identified were subsequently used as the input for a computational fluid dynamics analysis to determine the power, forces and torques on the body.
