For killer flies, speed is everything. “Their prey can come from anywhere, and the Mediterranean is so dry that it’s rare for them to have prey,” Gonzalez-Bellido says. They immediately take off after anything that could conceivably be a meal and, once airborne, catch their prey as quickly as possible so that they themselves aren’t cannibalized by others of their kind. Their chases are near impossible for even well-trained human eyes to follow. By filming these pursuits with high-speed cameras, Gonzalez-Bellido showed that they typically take a quarter of a second. They might even be over in
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