Ever been sitting around and just chillin, but you can’t because some fly keeps annoying you. It lands on your leg, arms, and occasionally bumps into you head. You grab the fly swatter and aimlessly try to get the little son of a gun, but to no avail. He’s gone. A few minutes later its walking on the table in front of you just out of reach of your fly swatter. As you stealthily lean over to wack him, it flies off, leaving you thinking… If I get my hands on you…
Why are flies so hard to wack? Well it seems they see time a little bit differently than we do. According to the “Conversation,” The secret to this impressive evasiveness isn’t some kind of mind-reading trick of the fly. It’s their superior vision. Flies have up to 6,000 ommatidia, or mini lenses, in each eye and can see us approach in “slow motion”. Humans see at about 60 hz per second. Flies see at 250 hz per second. They may not have the highest resolution vision, but they’ve got some of the “fastest” vision on earth – giving them the time to quickly react and escape. To the naked eye, as we prepare to swat, the fly may not seem to do anything particularly special. But scientists have employed super slow-motion video cameras to track the split-second movement of flies. When a fly spots a predator, or person waving their arms about, it freezes, repositions itself, and commences a choreographed dance, perfectly co-ordinating its legs and wings to lift and buzz off in the opposite direction to the incoming threat. Flies can do this so quickly that our eyes can’t even follow their pre-flight maneuvering or predict the path of their elegant escape. A split-second to us could be lifesaving for a fly.
The earliest know fly swatter was patented by Robert R. Montgomery who called it a fly-killer in 1900. Montgomery sold his patent to John L. Bennett, a wealthy inventor and an industrialist who made further improvements on the design. However, the origin of the name “flyswatter” does not come from its inventors. In the summer of 1905, Kansas was plagued by an overabundance of flies, which as well as causing annoyance, aided in the spread of communicable disease. Dr. Samuel Crumbine, a member of the Kansas board of health, wanted to raise public awareness of the threat of flies. He was inspired by a chant at a local Topeka softball game: “swat the ball”. In a health bulletin published soon afterwards, he exhorted Kansans to “swat the fly”. In response, a schoolteacher named Frank H. Rose created the “fly bat”, a device consisting of a yardstick attached to a piece of screen. Crumbine had named the device now commonly known as the flyswatter.
If flies are a persistent problem in and around your home there are a few options for relief. Screening windows and doors will assist in keeping them outside. Reducing opportunities for them to breed is important too, so keep the backyard clean and tidy. Locate composting areas as far away from your house as possible. Reduce the amount of waste (both garbage and pet droppings) around the backyard and keep garbage bins covered.
But remember to stay calm. Flies have been here for 250 million years. The fly swatter, about a hundred years.
Be the first to comment