DOI: 10.5061/dryad.hqbzkh1cc
title: Wings and halteres act as coupled dual-oscillators in flies

description: The mechanics of Dipteran thorax is dictated by a network of exoskeletal
 linkages which, when deformed by the flight muscles, generate coordinated
 wing movements. In Diptera, the forewings power flight, whereas the
 hindwings have evolved into specialized structures called halteres which
 provide rapid mechanosensory feedback for flight stabilization. Although
 actuated by independent muscles, wing and haltere motion is precisely
 phase-coordinated at high frequencies. Because wingbeat frequency is a
 product of wing-thorax resonance, any wear-and-tear of wings or thorax
 should impair flight ability. How robust is the Dipteran flight system
 against such perturbations? Here, we show that wings and halteres are
 independently-driven, coupled oscillators. We systematically reduced the
 wing length in flies and observed how wing-haltere synchronization was
 affected. The wing-wing system is a strongly-coupled oscillator, whereas
 the wing-haltere system is weakly-coupled through mechanical linkages
 which synchronize phase and frequency. Wing-haltere link acts in a
 unidirectional manner; altering wingbeat frequency affects haltere
 frequency, but not vice-versa. Exoskeletal linkages are thus key
 morphological features of the Dipteran thorax which ensure wing-haltere
 synchrony, despite severe wing damage.
description: This data was collected as part of experiments to test the
 mechanical coupling of wing and halteres in flies for the paper
 "Wings and halteres act as coupled dual-oscillators in flies",
 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.53824. Wing and haltere frequency and amplitude were computed from high speed videos of tethered soldier flies after a series of mechanical perturbations. Please find details of the data organization in the usage notes as well as the relevant readme file within the dataset. The code database to generate this data can be found at https://github.com/TanviDeora/Coupled_dual_oscillators_DeoraSaneSane.
description: The data analysis has two separte parts: Frequency analysis and
 the Amplitude analysis across several fly treatments. 
 The frequency analysis files are organized in separate treatment
 files. The files include several .mat files whose organization are
 explained in the readme file in the FrequencyAnalysis folder.
 The amplitude analysis has three separate subfolders:1) First one
 contains the digitized data from videos (Digitization_Final_Data), 2)
 second contains all the analysis file of the digititized data
 (GetAmplitude) and the 3) third contains three trained models for tracking
 wing and halteres (TrainedModels). Like the frequency analysis, these are
 organized with each treatment's data in a separate folder. For each
 treatment in the the "GetAmpltude" folder, there are two
 subfolders: 1) "TransformedData" which contains the fly centric
 coordinates for the digitized points in a .mat format and 2)
 "Kinematics" folder which contains all the relevant kinematics
 of body parts (wings and halteres), also in .mat format and finally 3) it
 also contains one .csv file for each fly in that treatment which has the
 wing(and haltere) ampltiude across all wing beats for a single fly as well
 as a "median_summary.csv" file which has the mean amplitude for
 all flies.