The Atlas of Drosophila Morphology is an excellent resource, find a pdf on the lab server in the “Atlas of Drosophila Morphology” folder.

Relationship of the CNS, circulatory system, and digestive system (credit: Joe Brock, Francis Crick Institute)

Nutrient control of Drosophila longevity

Circulatory system (A. Miller. The internal anatomy and histology of the imago of Drosophila melanogaster. In M. Demerec, editor, Biology of Drosophila, CSHL Press, p. 444, see hard copy for labels)

Somatic musculature (Atlas of Drosophila Development by Volker Hartenstein) - see linked page for the names of all numbered muscles; the head muscles are

1, 2 retractors of rostrum;

5 dilator of labrum;

6 retractor of paraphyses;

7 retractor of furca;

8 transverse muscle of haustellum

11 dilator of pharynx;

13 gracilis;

16 muscle of frontal pulsatile organ

Tracheal system (Atlas of Drosophila Development by Volker Hartenstein)

Fly Head Anatomy#

Zhao et al. 2025 released some nice 1-um resolution micro CT scans of the fly head. These can be useful for visualizing the position of the brain relative to cuticle landmarks, as well as some of the musculature including muscle 16. Unfortunately the proboscis and associated musculature is not present in these scans.

To facilitate ease of use, there are downsampled (2um voxel size) and annotated versions of the data on the lab server under References/head_micro_ct_2um. These tiffs are formatted such that they can be easily loaded and viewed in napari.

To view the volumes, install napari following these instructions: https://napari.org/dev/tutorials/fundamentals/installation.html

Once you run napari (command line: napari), load all the image layers you want by going to file>load images. Due to the size of the images, it is recommened you copy the folder locally first.

Drag image_data or head_only to the bottom of the layer list so that the label layers are visible.

You can then scroll through the image stacks in any orientation (using the change order of visible axes button) or view as 3d by toggling 3d mode (button second from the left below the layer list). I recommend using rendering: iso.

For instructions about how to use the napari viewer, see this page: https://napari.org/dev/tutorials/fundamentals/viewer.html

Reference:

Zhao, A., Gruntman, E., Nern, A. et al. Eye structure shapes neuron function in Drosophila motion vision. Nature 646, 135–142 (2025).

Muscles of the proboscis#

This paper has some great images and diagrams for this: https://elifesciences.org/articles/54978/figures