Fruit Flies: Masters of Hypergravity

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There’s a reason astronauts, fighter pilots, and race car drivers go through extensive training to handle the g-forces they’ll experience on the job, like this ESA astronaut spinning in a giant centrifuge. G forces essentially add weight to bodies and create an intense, bumpy ride.

But what about a small creature like a fruit fly? How do they deal with gravitational forces above the 1 g level that we experience on Earth?

According to a recent study by University of California Riverside entomologists, fruit flies handle it much better than you might think.

Female fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) bred in captivity were subjected to hypergravity conditions inside a custom-built centrifuge. “The centrifuge is like a merry-go-round,” explained the study’s lead author, Sushmita Arumugam Amogh, in a press release. “The faster you go, the more you feel pulled outward. That’s hypergravity.”

Three-day-old flies were placed in the centrifuge for 24 hours. By varying the intensity of gravity from 1 g to 4 g, 7 g, 10 g or 13 g, the researchers studied how g-forces affected the fruit flies’ movements. After completing its centrifugation session, each fly was released into a stoppered glass vial where the researchers observed its behavior.

Read more: “The most detailed brain map ever created”

Flies naturally move upward against gravity, climbing walls or other surfaces. The researchers therefore hypothesized that the ascension of these flies would be impaired, because hypergravity makes movement more energy-intensive. Instead, flies that had been exposed to gravity four times Earth’s (4 g) became hyperactive, climbing further, perhaps eager to find food to meet their higher energy needs. However, after exposure to 7 g or more, the flies climbed less, apparently switching to an energy conservation mode.

To determine how long the effects of gravity lasted, other fruit flies were exposed to microgravity from the egg stage until adulthood (for a total of about 50 days). Additionally, a group of flies was maintained in hypergravity conditions for 10 generations to evaluate the consequences of gravity over entire life cycles. No evidence of fruit fly damage has surfaced. In fact, at a modest level of microgravity – 4g, which would make a human susceptible to fainting as blood drains from their brain – fruit flies have proven remarkably resilient. They hatched, fed, grew, climbed, mated and reproduced.

“Our study is timely,” said study author Ysabel Milton Giraldo. “The connection between gravity, physiology and energy consumption will become increasingly important to understand as space travel is poised to become more common in the future.”

Fruit flies are certainly more than ready to enjoy the ride.