[Guest]

I just had to vent. I don't know how it happened but suddenly my melanogaster cultures have all developed the ability to fly. I have been using this same line of flies for 2 years now, with no problems. Now suddenly every culture (except one) has a few fliers. Hopefully I can use that one culture to start up everything again. In the mean time I will feed off the fliers and hope to get everything back to normal. Any ideas how this could have happened?

 

[Arklier]

Is there any chance that wild flies could have gotten to the cultures? If all of your cultures have developed the trait at once, then that's the best bet. The flight trait is dominant, so any fly that mates with flying flies will have flying offspring. I remember back in biology class about how Fransesco Redi proved spontaneous generation was false. He took a piece of meat and put it in a jar, then covered the jar's mouth with a cloth. The flies laid eggs on the cloth. I'm betting that's what happened to your cultures, except that the maggots hatched out and fell in the medium. It is also possible that they may have spontaniously mutated back to flying ability, but since this just happened suddenly and to all but one of your cultures, this isn't likely.

 

[jbeetle]

Also, if you have differnt types of flies and mix them into a new culture usually you will start to get fliers again... or so I have heard. Most likely it has to do with wild flies though.

 

[Guest]

All of my flies melanogaster are from the same line. I mix them up in a cup before I redistribute them into the new cultures. This could explain why all of them got the trait at once even if only one culture had the mutation present. They wild fly interbreeding is another possibility, I live in Louisiana and there are all kinds of fruit flies and other bugs here. I just moved and I am hoping to go looking for termites soon. Thanks for the input, I hope that I still have some that don't fly so I don't have to order a new set of cultures to start everything up. The ones I am using are well adapted to my home made medium.