My Top 10 Beginner Mistakes

[Biology]

to jgibeau:

oh thats good you had me laughing my head off. "One way carpet safari" hahaha!
and wow you seriously got a bit of Phylobate poison in you??? wow!!! that must have sucked!!!

[Steve25]

Originally Posted by dartboy2

I'm sill not done with my first viv but so far my #1 problem was not breaking the seal in the silicone tube, here I am thinking wow this is harder to pull than it looks and on the next squeeze goes a loud POP and that was really fun to clean up.lol

Lol I did the same thing and went to the store saying "I think you sold me old Silicone.." And he said did you break the seal.. and I said "oh dang."

-The other mistake was putting wet cocofiber on my background and never holding lol.

-Breaking the sprayer noozle on GS lol

-Buying too many plants in the beginning

[Boondoggle]

Man, I can't believe I'm still making beginner mistakes.

I have been raising blue springtails on large charcoal chunks over coco chunks. I have some ancon hills that hide a lot and have not been putting on weight very well so I was trying to lure them out by putting the large charcoal piece, teeming with springtails into the middle of the tank. I was hoping a feeding station scenario would bring them out a bit more. Unfortunatly I put the charcoal back into the original springtail shoebox when they were done with it.

As you can guess my culture crashed DEAD after doing that twice. I suspect I introduced other fauna into the culture (I saw an Isopod in there?). It is now a poorly populated mite culture.

I no longer have blue springtails.

[NMiamiguy40]

1. Not finding this site first before doing anything on your viv

No gloves with the great stuff and had to scrub scrub scrub till my skin was red

[BBJ]

When you are still merely a rookie into the exciting world of Fruit Flies and you are getting ready to set up a couple of new cultures:
Get a couple of vacuum cleaners, strap them to your belt and get ready to wield em' like a mad cowboy straight out of the wild west.

Keep It Simple Stupid!... Seriously, you dont need that waterfall and the flowing stream and the pond and what not. It will only bring you headaches.

Do something really sweet for your wife/girlfriend before you introduce them to the food items which the little cute frogs will be consuming. Try to make up some reasons why its not so bad to have a s***load of containers filled with bugs in your home.

Make sure that you remove ALL objects lying on the floor before you and your assistant put down the 200 gallon vivarium, or prepare for the unnerving crack made by large panes of glass being broken.

[decev]

Reading that mixing fruit fly strains creates fliers, and thinking "Yeah yeah why would I mix flightless and wingless cultures anyway?"

Then later feeding a froglet that has a banana piece in its viv both types of flies and getting a face full of flying fruit flies one day when you open the lid.

[decev]

Originally Posted by BBJ

Make sure that you remove ALL objects lying on the floor before you and your assistant put down the 200 gallon vivarium, or prepare for the unnerving crack made by large panes of glass being broken.

Oh jeez.... that happened to you? Was the viv filled or empty?

[Dragonfly]

Just a note of information, you can safely mix hydei & one version of melanos together without getting flyers.

[BBJ]

Originally Posted by decev

Oh jeez.... that happened to you? Was the viv filled or empty?

It did indeed, luckily there was no water in it, but apart from that it was all set up... Very annoying and took ages to repair

[frogface]

When dealing with fruit flies, be sure to put your hair in a ponytail before you take off the lid and lean over the container.