Understanding upside-down landings of flies

“When I was a student, Late Prof. K. S. Krishnan who was on the interview panel asked me, ‘how do flies land on the ceiling?’ Although seemingly an innocuous question, it turns out to be a really complex phenomenon,” says Prof Sanjay Sane from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. Now, after several years of research using the modern state of the art tools and months of video recordings his team has answered the question. The paper recently published in Science Advances notes that the inverted landing “involves a serial sequence of well-coordinated behavioural modules.”