Caltech scientists have determined why flies are so hard to swat, to the delight of world media.

Using hi-speed photography Michael Dickinson and Gwyneth Card found that fruit flies (Drosophila) calculate the direction of a threatening swat and determine an optimal escape from your pathetically slow squashing attempt. Their research is published today in Current Biology.

“When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly’s body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting,” says Dickinson (press release).

“Our experiments showed that the fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture. This means that the fly must integrate visual information from its eyes, which tell it where the threat is approaching from, with mechanosensory information from its legs, which tells it how to move to reach the proper preflight pose.”

This is not was had been previously thought, says Forbes. Before this work it was assumed flies simply reflexively jumped when danger threatened. “Everybody assumed that [the jump reflex] would be the first thing. Nobody bothered to look earlier,” Dickinson told the paper.

According to the Times:

He added that he hoped the research might persuade people to give the insects a second chance by revealing their remarkable qualities. He said that he wanted to make people “think before they swat”.

But he’s willing to offer some advice if you insist on massacring the compound-eyed annoyances. According to Dickinson: “It is best not to swat at the fly’s starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter.”

Or you could just buy one of these and knock them clean out of the sky…

Image: Alamy