Yes. Bring the hand close very slowly, forefinger cocked... then....pow.
Other techniques I've employed: (1) cling film (saran wrap), (2) detergent spray (slows em down; dispatch after 2-4 rounds), (3) vacuum cleaner nozzle (they hunker down but are sucked in upon take-off)
Slow approach with a sheet 20-30cm wide held at opposite edges by both hands. The film being transparent the fly sometimes doesn't notice it. Also a convenient means of disposal.
I thought that most (all?) eyes only see motion, just as you do not feel the weight of your clothes anymore (or the presence/absense of your wallet in your back pocket) after a while. But reading up on microsaccades[1] - tiny involuntary eye movements which I thought fixed that in mammals - that does not seem to be the current understanding anymore.
If you want to catch a stationary fly, it's pretty easy to do so with your bare hands. The key thing to know is that they jump backward before taking flight.
Aim for a spot about 1-2" behind the fly, and about 1-2" above the fly. Try to catch it there, and your success percentage will be high.
The perspective of cathing a fly that walked on crap five minutes ago disgusts me. I know they cleanse their paws more often than I do mine, but faugh.
3) Do not care at all, and consider that our bodies are pretty well tuned to handle such thing as a few particles of foreign excrement (or other dirty things).
Seriously, we have become irrational animals afraid of everything. (I would wash my hand after splashing a fly if there was a rotten corpse around, though, and would have done even without the fly because my nose would have alerted me of a chemical danger.)
i always found it easy catching flies, especially in air, but squishing their guyts all over my hands is what bothers me most.
an easy way to catch flies is to put rubbing alcohol in a squirt gun. even less than direct hits takes them out of the sky, and the alcohol cleans stuff in collateral damage.
Three techniques:
1. Move your open hand towards the fly very slowly until you are 5cm (2 in) away then slap.
2. Move both hands slowly towards the fly and "clap" to catch it.
3. Blow gently downwards onto the fly, then slowly increase the force of the blowing. You might then be able to pin its wing to the surface.
Also, the greatly reduced drag and holes in the surface give fewer warnings to the fly that it's about to be hit, while the use of a tool allows for faster hits. It's really a pretty great invention to kill a lot of flying insects.
I have perfected this. I can even stop them mid-flight.
Spray at it with any liquid (e.g. water, household cleaner). It may take a couple of squirts but it's easy as it doesn't need to be exact. The fly will fall to the ground where you can just squash it with a tissue.
Btw, glass cleaner (the one with toxic smell, usually of blue color) is the best tool. Even a light contact with the cloud and it's dead in few seconds. But pay strong attention to not spray it over food, drinks, clothes, fire and your eyes.
Alcohols (including our favorite ethyl alcohol) will kill most if not all arthropods on contact. They absorb it through their exoskeleton and due to their open circulatory system the poison will spread quickly throughout the whole body. The lighter alcohols will evaporate quickly too, making them convenient and effective knockdown agents.
As someone who works in visual neuroscience, this article's a tough read. Lots of statements that are semi-accurate at best.
1) Eyes don't work like cameras; there's no real "exposure" phase as such (even though there's lots of thresholds). So it's misleading to talk about discrete images that we sample at some fixed frequency. Instead, it's much more helpful to think of photoreceptors and subsequent processing stages as continuous band-pass filters. At some point, high frequencies are simply cut off because the electro-chemistry of the cell can't keep up. For us, that cut-off comes earlier than it does for invertebrates.
2) There's no mechanical interaction between light and photoreceptor. Instead, the transduction cascade of the dipteran eye seems to encompass a mechanical (as opposed to biochemical) step.
3) It's pure conjecture to talk about a fly's slowed down "perception" of the world. The reason why they take off before you get to them is much simpler -- there's a highly optimized reflex that connects eye and flight muscles via the giant fiber (a particularly rapid nerve). We have similar responses, like eye lid closing etc. Additionally, their photoreceptors are sensitive and fast. But there's zero evidence that flies have any sense of continuous time that could be faster than ours.
Thanks for the informed opinion. I know way less about animal vision than machine vision but the statement that eyes have a "frame rate" and "send images to the brain a fixed number of times a second" smelled really bad.
A maybe-dumb question about point (3) - I've noticed that when I get a blink/flinch response from something (usually some sand or a bug hitting my face when I'm on the bike), it feels like I blink just a split second before the thing hit me. Given that I'm unlikely to have any kind of precognition, do you think this might be related to the blink reflex being 'hard wired' and so my brain gets the "hey, a thing hit your face" signal after the "hey, your eyes just closed" signal? (Alternately, I read something once about our perception of audio being delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception of vision, despite our visual processing being slower than audio - maybe the signal that caused the flinch gets 'buffered'?)
> I've noticed that when I get a blink/flinch response from
> something (usually some sand or a bug hitting my face when
> I'm on the bike), it feels like I blink just a split second
> before the thing hit me.
We know very little about conscious perception or even the locus at which sensory signals are integrated to generate a conscious percept. But it's perfectly possible that delays differ across modalities and that the proprioceptive signal about lid-closing reaches whatever-relevant-area before your visual system catches up.
> I read something once about our perception of audio being
> delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception
> of vision
Not an expert on audition, but the brain is really good at generating coherent representations of the physical world across modalities. I wouldn't be surprised if such cross-sensory synchronisation happened in some form.
Is it possible that there is a delay for one-off unanticipated events, but the feedback loop we form between perception and playing is much tighter? I definitely have a hard time playing anything with much more than 5ms audio buffers myself.
I'm really surprised at the resistance to this idea. Granted that we can never know another person's conscious experience, never mind another species', what reason could there be to think that it would be the same in this regard as ours? Seems to me the burden of proof falls more on that claim than on the claim that they're different, which I find completely plausible.
Still what about non escape reflex sense of "time" ? Say like landing. Don't they perceive the world at a faster (or I should say systemically adequate for them) rate ?
Short abstract snippet (the "parallel circuits" are other, non-giant descending neurons that also trigger the escape behavior upon a looming stimulus):
"Intracellular recording of the descending giant fiber (GF) interneuron during head-fixed escape revealed that GF spike timing relative to parallel circuits for escape actions determined which of the two behavioral responses was elicited. The process was well described by a simple model in which the GF circuit has a higher activation threshold than the parallel circuits, but can override ongoing behavior to force a short takeoff. Our findings suggest a neural mechanism for action selection in which relative activation timing of parallel circuits creates the appropriate motor output."
I always find a better success rate using a gauze like material with sufficient holes to let air flow through it rather than around it, which considering the weight of the fly, could help it effectively surf the air flow the swatting device generates as it goes to make contact with the area the fly was on.
Great! Any idea what mechanism adrenaline activates that gives the perception of time slowing down? That is something I've always wondered about having experienced it probably half a dozen times in my life so far.
If your brain and body spanned the size of the Earth, the signals into and within the brain would as a matter of physics take much longer than with a human.
It seems reasonable to suppose this is also true when you compare a tiny fly with a comparatively massive human.
That said, I haven't seen specific, explicit evidence to prove this seemingly logical theory.
How about an analogy to CPU clock speed, bus speed, etc.? I think that's really what the camera analogy is getting at -- the rate at which the signals are getting processed and acted upon. Clock speed / bus speed would similarly determine how high of frequency you could "hear" stuff if we were talking about ears instead of eyes. I know the computer model of the brain is way off in many respects but I find it pretty useful for stuff like this.
Regarding point 3, I have no sources at the moment but have read several scientific articles in the past claiming that different organisms really do have a fundamentally faster or slower perception of continuous time, and also that drugs can temporarily influence this perception. Is there no truth to this at all?
Differences in visual flicker-fusion rate between species is interesting. But I think it's a bit presumptuous to claim that time drags by 4x more slowly in a fly's reality, and that's why it can usually escape a giant hand falling from the sky. The fly escapes because it's quicker than you. It would probably be just fine if could detect motion at 60 Hz.
Only partially related to this topic, but is anyone else driven crazy by the Cadillac taillights? I haven't talked to anyone else who is, but I can identify one from a mile away at night. It's like the refresh rate is just low enough that it flashes and it drives me nuts.
Check out the "bug-a-salt" salt gun. With good aim it's more effective and fun than a flyswatter. Absurdly, amazon wouldn't ship to California but you can buy from https://bugasalt.com
When swatting, I've found they can only fly forward and had good success anticipating that movement. Apparently others in this thread can catch them on the fly's initial backwards jump, which I had never noticed.
These are fun but I found them incredibly hard to aim; for me, the Bug-a-salt was only effective when less than two feet away from the fly. (And the fly had to be stationary -- no dramatic mid-air takedowns.)
It's really easy to pick up flies with a hose attachment on a vacuum.
Every once in a while we get a number of flies in the house during the summer when the doors and windows are open. They tend to gather in the sides of our windows, looking for a way out. I used to catch them one by one, and then I tried a vacuum. It was easy, once they are aware of the vacuum it's too late to fly away, and they get sucked right up. It's probably not worth while for one or two flies, but if you're going after a few a vacuum can be really effective.
You will notice that flies do not generally flee from things swaying (plants branches, curtains) in the wind, if you make a sway movement with your swatting implement the fly will ignore you when your too close for it to escape.
It's super easy with an electric fly swatter - it's like a small tennis racket which kills on contact. They might see it with their super fast vision but the racket is just too large for them to avoid m
I've found it much easier to try and hit the fly mid air with one open palm, rather than crushing it against a surface. If you hit it, it will be fall to the floor dizzy/stunned. From there just pick it up with a piece of paper.
Man you guys just approaching the problem the wrong way. I’ll tell you how Mike D, a technitian at Apple taught me. You simply wait for the fly to land, and then come at it from behind. The flys launch backwards when they take off, so you can open hand catch them, perform the stun, and get them out of the lab with all your open hardware.
I keep my hand vertical when approaching the fly and turn it only when accelerating for the swat. That way the approaching hand appears with less dramatic increase in size which allows a quick approach without warning the fly.
After reading these comments, I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one who owns an old-fashioned flyswatter. With a long, stiff handle and a flick of the wrist, it moves a lot faster than a fly. I've even stunned them by hitting them in mid-air.
not trying to be that guy, but I swat the fly dead 9/10 times. Mr Miyagi did also train me, but I don't use the chopsticks like my moderated compardre above.
I really never had a problem catching flies and I don't even think I have fast reactions. You just need to observe their flight silently for a few moments, breathe subtly and make your move suddenly, preferably from the back. They are amazing at avoiding hits from the front. Put yourself in the mindset of a deadly, stalking predator instead of irritated house resident and watch those kill counts stack up.
79 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadOther techniques I've employed: (1) cling film (saran wrap), (2) detergent spray (slows em down; dispatch after 2-4 rounds), (3) vacuum cleaner nozzle (they hunker down but are sucked in upon take-off)
It doesn't mean that they only see moving objects by the way. In flight they see because everything is moving around them.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade
Aim for a spot about 1-2" behind the fly, and about 1-2" above the fly. Try to catch it there, and your success percentage will be high.
2) see the fly walk over your food, your face, your kids food...
Do you want to touch a "dirty" fly, or eat what the fly has walked on?
I'll take #1 any day.
Seriously, we have become irrational animals afraid of everything. (I would wash my hand after splashing a fly if there was a rotten corpse around, though, and would have done even without the fly because my nose would have alerted me of a chemical danger.)
an easy way to catch flies is to put rubbing alcohol in a squirt gun. even less than direct hits takes them out of the sky, and the alcohol cleans stuff in collateral damage.
Yes, I have a lot of time on my hands.
Also a lot of fly goo.
The spray is likely to hit it. Wet flies don't.
Mostly because they make an awesome sound.
Also, the greatly reduced drag and holes in the surface give fewer warnings to the fly that it's about to be hit, while the use of a tool allows for faster hits. It's really a pretty great invention to kill a lot of flying insects.
And some more references on how compount eyes see mechanically, as opposed to chemically, would be interesting.
Spray at it with any liquid (e.g. water, household cleaner). It may take a couple of squirts but it's easy as it doesn't need to be exact. The fly will fall to the ground where you can just squash it with a tissue.
1) Eyes don't work like cameras; there's no real "exposure" phase as such (even though there's lots of thresholds). So it's misleading to talk about discrete images that we sample at some fixed frequency. Instead, it's much more helpful to think of photoreceptors and subsequent processing stages as continuous band-pass filters. At some point, high frequencies are simply cut off because the electro-chemistry of the cell can't keep up. For us, that cut-off comes earlier than it does for invertebrates.
2) There's no mechanical interaction between light and photoreceptor. Instead, the transduction cascade of the dipteran eye seems to encompass a mechanical (as opposed to biochemical) step.
3) It's pure conjecture to talk about a fly's slowed down "perception" of the world. The reason why they take off before you get to them is much simpler -- there's a highly optimized reflex that connects eye and flight muscles via the giant fiber (a particularly rapid nerve). We have similar responses, like eye lid closing etc. Additionally, their photoreceptors are sensitive and fast. But there's zero evidence that flies have any sense of continuous time that could be faster than ours.
Ah, well. The perils of science journalism.
They might not view time faster, but they view and react to events much closer to the present.
A maybe-dumb question about point (3) - I've noticed that when I get a blink/flinch response from something (usually some sand or a bug hitting my face when I'm on the bike), it feels like I blink just a split second before the thing hit me. Given that I'm unlikely to have any kind of precognition, do you think this might be related to the blink reflex being 'hard wired' and so my brain gets the "hey, a thing hit your face" signal after the "hey, your eyes just closed" signal? (Alternately, I read something once about our perception of audio being delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception of vision, despite our visual processing being slower than audio - maybe the signal that caused the flinch gets 'buffered'?)
We know very little about conscious perception or even the locus at which sensory signals are integrated to generate a conscious percept. But it's perfectly possible that delays differ across modalities and that the proprioceptive signal about lid-closing reaches whatever-relevant-area before your visual system catches up.
> I read something once about our perception of audio being > delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception > of vision
Not an expert on audition, but the brain is really good at generating coherent representations of the physical world across modalities. I wouldn't be surprised if such cross-sensory synchronisation happened in some form.
If such a delay does occur it is considerably less than 100ml as that kind of latency would be very noticeable playing a musical instrument.
See: https://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n7/full/nn.3741.htm...
Short abstract snippet (the "parallel circuits" are other, non-giant descending neurons that also trigger the escape behavior upon a looming stimulus):
"Intracellular recording of the descending giant fiber (GF) interneuron during head-fixed escape revealed that GF spike timing relative to parallel circuits for escape actions determined which of the two behavioral responses was elicited. The process was well described by a simple model in which the GF circuit has a higher activation threshold than the parallel circuits, but can override ongoing behavior to force a short takeoff. Our findings suggest a neural mechanism for action selection in which relative activation timing of parallel circuits creates the appropriate motor output."
When swatting, I've found they can only fly forward and had good success anticipating that movement. Apparently others in this thread can catch them on the fly's initial backwards jump, which I had never noticed.
Every once in a while we get a number of flies in the house during the summer when the doors and windows are open. They tend to gather in the sides of our windows, looking for a way out. I used to catch them one by one, and then I tried a vacuum. It was easy, once they are aware of the vacuum it's too late to fly away, and they get sucked right up. It's probably not worth while for one or two flies, but if you're going after a few a vacuum can be really effective.
I’ll never forget seeing Mike catch that fly.