The silent massacre
The Angry Flies Experiment
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| The Angry Flies Experiment One day in the late fall of 2009, I took a load of pine straw into the fruit orchard to place around the tree trunks against the approaching winter cold. I had hardly begun work when a huge flying insect began attacking me. I use the word “attack” because that was exactly what it was, an attack. I recognized the insect to be what we locally refer to as a horse fly. However, it was by far the largest one I had ever seen. No other flying insects were out, as it was late in the year for insects. The horse fly circled and attacked me tenaciously. Although I flailed and fanned my arms to shoo it away, no action on my part daunted it. It had the uncanny ability to attack in my least defensible area, always on the upper back just below my neck and between the shoulder blades, where I could not reach. It bit me hard time after time. The attack lasted probably a full five minutes before the fly finally flew away, probably satiated by the blood it had drawn. As a longtime victim of electronic stalking and mind control, few things surprise me. Because of the savagely aggressive nature of the horse fly, I immediately thought that it was somehow the work of the attackers. I reasoned that the fly had perhaps been trained to search out particular frequencies or perhaps to hone in on my particular frequency. Over the next several weeks, I occasionally remembered the vicious attack and pondered just how the attackers might have performed that trick. Then, on Saturday, January 16, 2010, I found a feature story in the Yahoo News entitled “Angry Flies May Help Explain Human Aggression” written by Marlene Cimons of the National Science Foundation (NSF). That article proved very revealing. The writer explained that biologist David Anderson, a scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Caltech, an institution partially supported by the NSF, had “set out to learn whether [fruit] flies, like bees, can get angry -- part of a broader effort to study how animal behavior relates to genetics.” In the experiment, fruit flies were trained to become extremely aggressive by using puffs of air to anger them. Anderson and his colleagues showed that under stress the flies produced a chemical known as pheromone, which is linked to “specific neurons” in the fly’s brain. The fruit fly’s brain consists of approximately 20,000 neurons, which are “considered a valuable system with which to study the genetic basis of learning, courtship, memory and circadian rhythms.” The writer went on to say that fruit fly research has “been a powerful tool with which to study emotions,” . . . for “most of the genes in the fruit fly are also in humans, including neurons that produce brain chemicals associated with several psychiatric disorders.” Enough said. That particular NSF experiment doubtlessly had nothing to do with the aggressive horse fly that attacked me. Nevertheless, the article makes very clear that scientists are interested in using flying insects in studying emotions in similar situations. Or are scientists simply studying insects as models for building drones to spy on humans? In a December 16, 2011 MSNBC U.S.News article on domestic spying drones, Sylvia Wood quotes M. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, as saying “Drones are capable of finding or following a specific person. . . .They can fly patterns in search of suspicious activities or hover over a location in wait. Some are as small as birds or insects [emphasis is mine], others as big as blimps.” Download 0.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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