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posted by Blackmoore on Saturday November 08 2014, @02:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-out-the-growth-ray dept.

The predatory Tiger Beetle can cover about 120 times its body size per second, or about 9 km/h. If it was the size of a human, that would be 770 km/h.
While this is a remarkable feat for a hunter, in this case it should be too fast: its vision and therefore its prey start to blur.

Researchers from the Univerity of Pittsburgh now solved the mystery, how the beetle knows when to open its mandibles and when to close them again.

“Is it a matter of distance (to prey), the size (the prey) appears on the retina, the projected time to collision? There are lots of variables,” he [1] says.
Using a dummy piece of prey (a plastic bead on a string), Zurek let the beetles give chase and recorded their hunting efforts in super slow-mo. As the beetle begins to catch up to the escaping dummy prey, the contracting image of the prey as perceived by the beetle begins to expand, which is the cue for the beetle to open its jaws, Zurek found. And as the image begins to recede, the jaws close.
This research, Zurek says, reveals a novel and potentially widespread mechanism for how behavioral decisions can be made based on visual “rules” in dynamic situations, where both the observer and the target are moving.

[1] University of Pittsburgh’s Daniel Zurek, a postdoctoral researcher in Nathan Morehouse’s lab in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences

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