According to scientists, biting flies (those that can transmit diseases by biting humans) are attracted to blue objects because they confuse the color with an animal that could serve as food.
The study was published on Wednesday (28), in “The Royal Society Publishing”.
The discovery is important, as it can make fly traps more effective and help fight diseases transmitted by these animals, such as sleeping sickness, for example.
The researcher who led the study, Roger Santer, from the department of Life Sciences at the University of Aberystwyth, told the newspaper The Guardian that field studies have long shown that flies are attracted to the color blue. Therefore, traps around the world to capture the insect are already made in this color.
“But why biting flies are especially attracted to blue traps has been a real puzzle for researchers,” he said.
The researchers then developed artificial neural networks that mimic the visual processing of the brain of biting flies – such as the tsetse fly, which transmits sleeping sickness; the stable fly and the horse fly, which tend to transmit diseases in farm animals.
Artificial neural networks were trained to distinguish animals from foliage in the environment and shadows on surfaces, using only the responses present in the eyes of the flies. Next, the networks would have to classify the blue traps.
While neural networks detected shadows by lack of brightness, animal recognition involved responses from photoreceptors sensitive to blue and green colors. Because of this, blue traps were mistaken for animals.
The result led the team to conclude that blue objects resemble potential hosts for flies.
“If we can understand the mechanisms that attract flies to colored traps, we can improve the color of those traps so that they capture flies more efficiently. This is a really important goal because different species of biting flies spread disease between humans and animals, so fly control is an important part of disease control,” Santer told the The Guardian.
*Posted by Fernanda Pinotti
Source: CNN Brasil
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