Halteres

This article is about insect anatomy. For halteres as used in ancient sports, see Halteres (ancient Greece).

8= single pair of wings and 9= halteres
Crane fly haltere
Halteres of a fly moving

Halteres (/hælˈtɪəriːz/; singular halter or haltere) (from Ancient Greek: ἁλτῆρες, hand-held weights to give an impetus in leaping) are a pair of small club-shaped organs on the body of two orders of flying insects that provide information about body rotations during flight.[1] Insects of the large order Diptera (flies) have halteres which evolved from a pair of ancestral hindwings, while males of the much smaller order Strepsiptera (stylops)[2] have halteres which evolved from a pair of ancestral forewings.

Halteres oscillate rapidly along with the wings and operate like vibrating structure gyroscopes:[3] any rotation of the plane of oscillation causes a force on the vibrating halteres by the Coriolis effect. The insect detects this force with sensory organs called campaniform sensilla and chordotonal organs located at the base of the halteres[3] and uses this information to interpret and correct its position in space. Halteres provide rapid feedback to the wing-steering muscles,[4] as well as to the muscles responsible for stabilizing the head.[5]

  1. ^ Dickinson, Michael H. (29 May 1999). "Haltere–mediated equilibrium reflexes of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 354 (1385): 903–916. doi:10.1098/rstb.1999.0442. PMC 1692594. PMID 10382224.
  2. ^ Merriam-Webster: stylops broadly: an insect of the order Strepsiptera |[1]
  3. ^ a b Pringle, J. W. S. (2 November 1948). "The Gyroscopic Mechanism of the Halteres of Diptera". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. 233 (602): 347–384. Bibcode:1948RSPTB.233..347P. doi:10.1098/rstb.1948.0007.
  4. ^ Fox, Jessica L.; Fairhall, Adrienne L.; Daniel, Thomas L. (23 February 2010). "Encoding properties of haltere neurons enable motion feature detection in a biological gyroscope". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 107 (8): 3840–3845. Bibcode:2010PNAS..107.3840F. doi:10.1073/pnas.0912548107. PMC 2840414. PMID 20133721.
  5. ^ Hengstenberg, Roland (1988). "Mechanosensory control of compensatory head roll during flight in the blowfly Calliphora erythrocephala Meig". Journal of Comparative Physiology A. 163 (2): 151–165. doi:10.1007/BF00612425. S2CID 15034239.