The Ears of a Fly
Would you be surprised to learn that this isn’t a flower? This blue and red “blossom” is made from an arrangement of five different fruit fly hearing organs. The hearing organs themselves are shown in blue, while the red areas are where these organs attach to the fly’s exoskeleton.
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DownloadThe Ears of a Fly
Would you be surprised to learn that this isn’t a flower? This blue and red “blossom” is made from an arrangement of five different fruit fly hearing organs. The hearing organs themselves are shown in blue, while the red areas are where these organs attach to the fly’s exoskeleton.
What am I looking at?
This image shows five individual fruit fly hearing organs arranged in a flowerlike pattern. Each of the individual organs (1) includes the hearing organ itself (2, indicated in blue) and a protein called NompA (3, indicated in red) that attaches the hearing unit to the fly’s exoskeleton.
Biology in the background
Fruit flies don’t have ears like most mammals do – instead, they hear with their antennae. When sound waves hit the antennae, the ends of them, called the aristae, vibrate. Specialized cells within the insect’s hearing organs, located in the second segment of the antennae and called Johnston’s organ, detect the vibration and turn it into a neural signal that is sent to the brain for interpretation.
These hearing organs are in a section of antenna that is 80 micrometers wide, or roughly the same size as a human hair.
Technique
This image was created using confocal microscopy.
Tongchao Li, Baylor College of Medicine