Researchers have found that biting flies are attracted to blue colour as they confuse it for an animal they want to feast on. The department of life sciences at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom led an etymological field study aimed at working out why these flies are especially attracted to blue, which has led to traps across the world being made in that colour. By developing artificial neural networks that mimic the visual processing in the brain of biting flies, researchers came to the conclusion they published. Flies caught in blue traps were more likely to not have eaten recently, suggesting they had been on the lookout for hosts. The research, which has also been peer-reviewed and published in the Proceedings of Royal Society B journal, also cast doubt on a previous theory that blue objects represented shade to the flies.