Dendroboard banner

Not-so-flightless:(

6K views 25 replies 12 participants last post by  Lukehartung99 
#1 ·
Some of my fruit flies have wings! Wonderful.
What can I do to salvage a culture (if possible) that no longer wanted to be flightless...

And can you start a culture with larva only? If you do not have enough flies to keep the diversity?
 
#3 ·
Let the culture get really full of flies and then pop it in the fridge for a couple hours. They'll cool off, get tired, and become unable to fly. After that take them out and dump into a feeding cup, I use old mealworm cups from the petstore to pour my flies into and dust them.

Dust them like normal but make sure when you swirl them to mix the vitamin powder onto them that you do it kind of extra hard. If your feeding cup has a lid you could even put that on and shake them quite a bit. You just want to do your best to disorientate them. After that, just feed like normal. Frogs should be able to eat them fine before they regain their bearings and are able to fly again.
 
#4 ·
On this topic, I saw a case of new fruit flys at Petco.
They were timberline brand. I opened a culture and they were all jumping out and winged. I mentioned this to the store manager and we checked the whole case, they were all the same. He pulled them from the shelf.
I then called timberline and said what I had seen, the woman told me a winged fruit fly from my house must have gotten in, I mentioned again I didn't buy any.:rolleyes:

Not happy with that companies response!
 
#5 ·
Were they flying tho? Turkish gliders have wings and can jump and glide but not fly. There's also curly wings and hydei also have wings but cannot fly.

Wingless = wingless
Flightless = winged but cannot fly

I bought a culture from Petco once and they were curly wings. Curly wings are really active and jump a lot.

If they actually flew you would know it and that's another story. Also, wingless can breed with flightless and wild, and produce flyers.
 
#6 ·
You can still probably feed from it but definitely cannot seed new cultures from it.

I've only had this happen once in about 2 years and it was because I tried perforated lids. Apparently the flies can breed though the holes :eek: if this is what you're using get rid of them.

There is also other causes I believe high temperature can cause flyers.
 
#7 ·
If you keep a (winged - flightless) culture around long enough the ability to fly is bred back in.

Its good to throw out older cultures out, and start with fresh. I noticed if I keep a culture longer than 2 months, they begin to fly again at around the 2 month mark. To avoid this I toss them out after about a month, and start fresh cultures.

Petco cultures are great in a bind, but I'd stay away from them altogether. They begin to fly rather quicker (like a week and half I've noticed), as opposed to homemade cultures.
 
#12 ·
I got a timberland winged flightless culture from petco about 2 months ago to do a test as I had read some winged flightless regain the ability to fly once they reach certain temperature.
I put a bunch in a 32 oz cup (sealed) and set it on top of my light fixture, it gets 113°, and after a while they did start to fly.

I fed from this culture only 2 times then tossed it because it was infested with mites.
 
#20 ·
I let the flies with wings out of the culture. It now has produced about 40 more flies, none of which have developed wings.
Depending on genetics and temperature it can take between 7 and 50 days for the eggs that were laid to complete their development and emerge as flies so you can't think that solved the issue.

some comments

Ed
 
#18 ·
There is only one way to salvage a culture once you have fliers in the mixture. You need to remove all of the adults as they emerge (at least once a day) and sort them between flier and non-fliers. This has to be done daily as you need to remove the flying males before they can mate with the wingless females. You want to isolate out the flightless males and females and use only those flies to start the new cultures.

It is generally easier to simply get a new culture.

some comments

Ed
 
#24 ·
Best thing to do not to waste these flies is cool them down in the fridge or freezer for a minute then feed. They will be slow and unable to fly. Only catch is feed less than normal with these because once they warm back up they will fly again. Next time be careful about wild flies mating with your stock and carful about crossing different mutated flies together as one type of fly will carry the good gene for the other mutated fly strain
 
#25 ·
I had my culture turn into fliers once and I'm pretty sure it was due to heat. I was caught off guard when I opened the lid. Let me say wife and daughter were not happy, fliers everywhere in the house. Dispose of culture and start fresh. This is what I found later in the day on the refrigerator door. Lol
 
#26 ·
I had my culture turn into fliers once and I'm pretty sure it was due to heat. I was caught off guard when I opened the lid. Let me say wife and daughter were not happy, fliers everywhere in the house. Dispose of culture and start fresh. This is what I found later in the day on the refrigerator door. Lol



That is hysterical haha.
I am starting a new culture with a different population of flies.
If I use a coffee filter for aeration, can the wild flies infiltrate the stock?


Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top