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Raise a fly. Watch life being built.
Open your vial and an embryo starts to grow, on the same real fly brain that runs at drosophila.io. Feed it, teach it, shape its brain, and look at it under the microscope at every stage. On day ten it ecloses, and what its brain has become decides how it looks.
An embryo. Its nuclei divide thirteen times inside one shared cell, rise to the surface and become cells. Then seven stripes appear: the even-skipped gene, the best-known picture in developmental biology.
A larva. It eats what you feed it, and you can see the food in its gut. Pair a smell with sugar or with bitter: its smell centre glows brighter with every lesson.
A pupa. The body is taken apart and built again, the brain too. This is when you can silence a group of neurons; at 40× you watch the real brain assemble, dark where you silenced it.
It ecloses. Every fly takes the same tests, and its card is drawn from what its brain does: an eye that cannot see motion turns white, a weak escape gives short wings.
