How fruit flies chase invisible ribbons of smell to get to their source

Fruit flies hunt by smell, navigating chaotic plumes of odor that swirl unpredictably in turbulent air. According to Ars Technica, researchers long believed these insects relied on simple hardwired reflexes—a 'surge and cast' strategy where a fly flies upwind when it detects a scent, then casts side to side if the plume breaks apart. But that model struggles to explain how flies successfully track odors across long distances when the chemical signal is sparse and unreliable. Now a team led by neuroscientist Vanessa Ruta at Rockefeller University has shown that fruit flies do something far more advanced—a finding that reveals just how sophisticated a creature's brain the size of a pinhead can be.

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