Left-right tympanal size asymmetry in the parasitoid fly .

is a parasitoid fly notable for its impressive hearing abilities relative to its small size. Here, we use it as a model organism to investigate if minor size differences in paired sensory organs may be beneficial or neutral to an organism's perception abilities. We took high-resolution images of tympanal organs from 21 specimens and found a statistically significant surface area asymmetry (up to 6.

Reconsidering tympanal-acoustic interactions leads to an improved model of auditory acuity in a parasitoid fly.

Although most binaural organisms locate sound sources using neurological structures to amplify the sounds they hear, some animals use mechanically coupled hearing organs instead. One of these animals, the parasitoid fly(), has astoundingly accurate sound localization abilities. It can locate objects in the azimuthal plane with a precision of 2°, equal to that of humans, despite an intertympanal distance of only 0.