How a fly sees the world – and why understanding its vision can help prevent disease

How a fly sees the world – and why understanding its vision can help prevent disease

Roger Santer, Aberystwyth University and Matthew Sparks, Swansea University Jakob von Uexküll was a Baltic German biologist ahead of his time, intrigued by the idea that animals inhabit unique perceptual worlds quite unlike our own. In 1934, he described angling for flies by swinging an adhesive-covered pea on a thread, finding that male flies would dive on the pea and be caught. Within the perceptual world of a fly, the swinging pea was a poten…