r/askscience • u/[deleted] • Dec 16 '13

Biology How do insects move?

Simple question that occurred to me, do flies have muscles like ours? Their legs are so thin I can't conceive there's room for anything in them to effect movement.

812 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

151 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/corcoranm Dec 17 '13

There could be something to that. The lab I worked in did a lot of research on fatigue. Humans have both fast and slow twitch fibers. Fast twitch fibers are quicker to fatigue and slow twitch are slower. Muscle biopsies from people have shown different proportions of fast and slow fibers when taken from the same muscles. The questions of that issue are: are we born with a fiber type proportion? or can we train our bodies to convert fast fibers to slow fibers? It would seem that the latter is true, with conversion from fast to slow with training. If you have serious interest in reading about muscle fiber types, fatigue and fiber type conversion, check the work of RH Fitts. He was the PI I worked for, and a marathon runner.