FLY – Fruit Fly Brain

A pet fruit fly driven by a model of its real brain.

FLY runs a whole-brain model of Drosophila in real time on your phone: 138,639 neurons and 15 million connections from the FlyWire connectome, mapped with an electron microscope. When you drop sugar in the terrarium, touch the antennae or cast a shadow, the stimulus travels through the fly's actual wiring, and that decides whether it feeds, grooms or escapes.

• 3D glass terrarium with a fly based on the NeuroMechFly model, walking with a real fly's step cycle • Live brain map: see which neurons are firing right now • Hunger, thirst, hormones and sleep: a hungry fly is more sensitive to sugar and sleeps at night • Your fly keeps living when the app is closed and lets you know when it gets hungry • Lab: watch the firing rates of the neurons behind feeding, grooming and escape

Honestly: this is a scientific model, not an uploaded fly. The wiring is real, the neurons are simplified. Hunger, hormones, sleep and walking are simplified models based on the literature. The Science & Licenses screen explains what is what.

Free, no ads, no tracking, no account.

Data: FlyWire (Dorkenwald et al. 2024, Schlegel et al. 2024), brain model by Shiu et al. 2024, body from NeuroMechFly (Wang-Chen et al. 2024).

Discovery signals