How do hoverflies use their righting reflex? Anna Verbe, Léandre Varennes, Jean-Louis Vercher, Stéphane Viollet To cite this version: Anna Verbe, Léandre Varennes, Jean-Louis Vercher, Stéphane Viollet. How do hoverflies use their righting reflex?. Journal of Experimental Biology, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 223 (13), pp.jeb215327. 10.1242/jeb.215327. hal-02899771 HAL Id: hal-02899771 https://hal-amu.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02899771 Submitted on 20 Aug 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. How do hoverflies use their righting reflex? Anna Verbe1, Léandre P. Varennes1, Jean-Louis Vercher1, and Stéphane Viollet1 1Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, ISM, Marseille, France. Corresponding author:
[email protected] Keywords: Syrphidae, hoverflies, Episyrphus balteatus, insect flight, body orientation, righting reflex Abstract When taking off from a sloping surface, flies have to reorient themselves dorsoventrally and stabilize their body by actively controlling their flapping wings. We have observed that the righting is achieved solely by performing a rolling manoeuvre. How flies manage to do this has not yet been elucidated. It was observed here for the first time that hoverflies’ reorientation is entirely achieved within 6 wingbeats (48.8ms) at angular roll velocities of up to 10 × 103 ◦=s and that the onset of their head rotation consistently follows that of their body rotation after a time-lag of 16ms.