[Darks!de]

Aside from the normal FF dusting everyone does, what other vitamins or supplements have been added to FF media? There have recently been several talks on problems with "short tongue" syndrome, SLS, color fading, immune systems, and others. Has anyone experimented or found any data on using supplements such as chlorella, spirulina, paprika, tomato, carrots, honey, etc? It would be very worth while to find out what kinds of affects such supplements have on PDF's.

Luke

 

[bbrock]

All of these have been added to ff media. I add brewer's yeast, spirulina, a blend of about 12 carotene rich powdered fruits and veggies, and cyclop-eze fish food to mine. Does it help? Probably not. FF don't have much capacity to gut load. There has been a lot of discussion about why you can't assume that a nutrient rich diet will increase the nutrient content of the insect. Basically it comes down to this. The chemicals that make a ff are the chemicals that make a ff and you can't change that. You aren't going to change an ff into the chemical composition of a papaya. However, there may be some nutrients that can get stored in the ff. Carotenes are typically stored in the fat so it may be possible that a ff fed a carotene rich diet may carry some of the carotenes in fat. Likewise the eyes contain rhodopsin which may be another coloring pigment so feeding the ff a diet that lets them maximize this pigment may have some benefit. But over all, it is not quite the same as being able to gut load a cricket or waxworm with a little packet of nutrients of your choice.