Real

cVA is a real pheromone, produced by male Drosophila melanogaster. Both sexes detect it with the same Or67d receptor neurons, so the sensory input really is identical. That signal really does arrive at a sexually dimorphic circuit, and the same molecule really does push males toward aggression and females toward receptivity. The divergence is in the wiring, not the smell.

Staged

The morphology on screen is procedurally generated to plausible Drosophila proportions. It is not traced from a connectome. The network is a stand-in graph, the dynamics are a simplified leaky integrate-and-fire, and the timing is stretched so the cascade is legible to a human eye. Spike counts and firing rates here are illustrative, not measured.

This mode

Next

The production version swaps this morphology for real skeletons from the MaleCNS and FlyWire public releases, keeping the same schema and the same renderer.