Pomace Fly

• It is the most studied animal in the history of biology: research on this fly has been recognised with several Nobel Prizes, from the demonstration that genes lie on chromosomes to the discovery of circadian clocks and of innate immunity.
• It shares about 60% of its genes with people, and around 75% of the genes associated with human disease have an equivalent in it.
• Its genome was fully sequenced in 2000, before the human one, and served as a testbed for the techniques later applied to ours.
• It is the most influential model organism in biology: eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done wholly or partly with this fly.
• Thomas Hunt Morgan chose it in 1909 because it was cheap and fitted in his small laboratory; in January 1910 he found a white-eyed male and showed that the gene lay on the X chromosome. It was the first time a specific gene had been located on a specific chromosome.
• His student Alfred Sturtevant used it to build one of the first genetic maps in history.
• The Nobels include Morgan's in 1933 for the role of chromosomes in heredity, Muller's in 1946 for X-ray-induced mutations, Lewis, Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus's in 1995 for the genetic control of embryonic development, Hoffmann's in 2011 for innate immunity and Hall, Rosbash and Young's in 2017 for circadian rhythms.
• Its genome was sequenced in 2000, one of the first for a multicellular organism.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Ripe and fermenting fruit, cellars, kitchens and refuse

Size at birth

During the larval phase the body mass multiplies about 200 times and the brain goes from about 10,000 neurons to 130,000-140,000 in the adult

Sexual maturity

7 days

Gestation / incubation

About 24 hours of egg incubation

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster; ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989); Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve; Wikipedia, Zooid; Recopilacion de datos anatomicos de Drosophila melanogaster (Lints et al. 1983); Recopilacion de datos anatomicos de Drosophila melanogaster (arXiv 2510.15745); Recopilacion de datos anatomicos de Drosophila melanogaster (Church & Robertson 1966; Jiao et al. 2022)