Tiny treadmills show how fruit flies walk

The runner on the treadmill wasn’t your typical gym rat. For one thing, he kept sprinting to the front of the treadmill and riding it to the back. For another, he had six legs.

The exerciser was a fruit fly — officially known as Drosophila melanogaster. For the first time, fruit flies can run forward on their own tiny treadmill surrounded by high-speed cameras. The results from those workouts, posted February 24 to bioRxiv.org, have already revealed insights about how bodies move.

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