Top 11 Michael Dickinson Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Michael Dickinson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Only flies have true halteres. In fact, the scientific

Only flies have true halteres. In fact, the scientific term for flies, ‘diptera,’ means ‘two wings.’ Most insects, including bees, have two pairs of wings for a total of four. In flies, the hindwing pairs have been transformed through evolution into the halteres.
Michael Dickinson
If you watch a fly on, say, a coffee table, you’ll see that they’re rubbing their little legs together to groom themselves; they’re actually quite clean creatures.
Michael Dickinson
Like many insects, flies are most sensitive to green light. This means that they would see their world as ‘black and white,’ in that they can’t see the multiple colors required to reconstruct a color image of the world. They do, however, have specialized cells that enable them to see ultraviolet wavelengths.
Michael Dickinson
A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That’s a super-interesting problem from an engineering perspective.
Michael Dickinson
The genus Drosophila is one of the great success stories. There’s hundreds of species within the genus. They’re on every continent except Antarctica, they’re in tropical rain forests, they’re in deserts, they’ve evolved many exotic mating behaviors, and they’re capable of incredibly long-distance flights.
Michael Dickinson
I grew up watching ‘Star Trek.’ I love ‘Star Trek.’ ‘Star Trek’ made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth. And what I do is I study insects.
Michael Dickinson
The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it’s a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly.
Michael Dickinson
The fruit flies we work with have the equivalent of about a 25 by 25 pixel camera. But that camera is very, very fast, about 10 times faster than the human visual system.
Michael Dickinson
When you see a fly flitting around your hair or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance. But in my lab, you really see a marvelous machine: arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet.
Michael Dickinson
Although finding fruit flies in your wine or beer can be a bit annoying, I hope people will pause to admire the tenacity of these clever little creatures. They are really just hungry animals looking for something to eat, and have no intention of ruining your happy hour.
Michael 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.
Michael Dickinson