How Does Everyone Deal with Mites?

1670 Views 12 Replies 7 Participants Last post by D3monic, Jun 26, 2011

hypostatic

Discussion Starter · Jun 24, 2011

So today I noticed small white/cream colored mites in one of my two FF cultures and I became very intrigued. I have a pretty old culture that I got from petco 2 months ago (The Fruit Fly Company brand) that has never gotten mites. However, the new FF culture that I started (Josh's Frogs brand) about a month ago however has a small infestation.

The older culture has gotten mold though, but never mites, and it is still slowly producing. I also noticed that the old culture is a lot dryer than the new culture, and I was wondering if this affects whether or not mites invade the culture. The two cultures have been treated in the same way and are in fact next to each other, so I'm not sure why one has mites and the other doesn't.

I searched around the forum and I found this link that someone else posted about how FF labs tackle mite problems:
http://evol.mcmaster.ca/~brian/netevoldir/Answers/Mite.infestation.in.fruit.flies.answers
How does everyone else tackle mites?

I was also wondering if anyone uses this:

Its offered at Josh's Frogs' site. I was wondering if it would be alright to spray my FF culture with this, since it means that my frogs would basically be ingesting those chemicals.

I was also wondering how mites affect dwarf white isopod cultures.

THANKS

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Okapi

· #7 · Jun 25, 2011 (Edited)

If your still thinking that products like those are used inside the culture rather than outside, then no, those chemicals will hurt the frogs.

These chemicals are used to line the surface that the cultures are sitting on. They are like a moat around a castle, they keep mites from getting inside the culture. That's one way that they can get in. The other way is by hitching a ride on flies used to start the culture. Thus the reasoning behind destroying cultures that are 30 days old, because that's how long it takes a few mites to breed to large numbers.

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