# House fly maggots?



## Fishman (Jan 16, 2007)

I tried searching for info on this and couldn't find much, so if you have a good link to post thanks.

My question is, as spring and summer are getting closer and house flys will be out and about. Has anyone tried feeding the house fly maggots to their frogs? I remember WAAAYYY back in Jr High biology class, we "cultured" some house flys by putting out a can of cat food with a cheese cloth cover for a couple of days. Then about 5-7 days later we were able to screen out the maggots under running water with a metal kitchen screen. My thought is these maggots might be good for some of out larger frogs. Any thoughts?


----------



## moothefrog (May 16, 2008)

I am trying to culture them myself. It has worked. I just put them in a normal FF culture and there are maggots apearing.


----------



## Fishman (Jan 16, 2007)

I was thinking more hands off than catching flies and culturing them. I was looking more for just letting the flies do their thing outside, and collecting the maggots later.


----------



## ReptileJay (Apr 8, 2009)

I have actually done this before... I obtained some larvae and allowed them to grow... flies laid eggs and I Irradiated newly hatched larvae under high intensity UV light, allowing for mutations to form... 

Though many larvae did die off due to the mutations, I was lucky enough to obtain a few flightless adults, which I then cultured and had a successful "Flightless Housefly" colony... until my ex killed them... 

I plan to do this again this summer... hopefully this time it'll actually survive for a bit...


----------



## forestexotics (Nov 14, 2006)

I have fed my frogs with housefly maggots with no ill effects. Only thing, those maggots get big! But that didnt stop the frogs from trying to eat them anyways...sara


----------



## Marinarawr (Jan 14, 2009)

ReptileJay said:


> I have actually done this before... I obtained some larvae and allowed them to grow... flies laid eggs and I Irradiated newly hatched larvae under high intensity UV light, allowing for mutations to form...
> 
> Though many larvae did die off due to the mutations, I was lucky enough to obtain a few flightless adults, which I then cultured and had a successful "Flightless Housefly" colony... until my ex killed them...
> 
> I plan to do this again this summer... hopefully this time it'll actually survive for a bit...


Wow... what kind of UV exposure are we talking about? Something more intense than a 6500k viv light? How fast was production (compared to, say, flightless melanos)? 
(If these questions aren't relevant to the thread I'll delete the post . I don't wanna hijack.)


----------



## ReptileJay (Apr 8, 2009)

I used a 150w Hg Vapor lamp... Exposed them for a few hours a day for 3 or 4 days right before the eggs hatched and directly after.

The productivity was MUCH slower than melanogaster... and the number of offspring was also considerably less. Also once the flies were exposed to the UV only 1 out of about 200 flies that survived was flightless... so the odds of actually finding that particular mutation is EXTREMELY slim... In reality the fact that i even ended up with 1 out of the 200 surviving flies was practically a miracle... when performing mutagenesis, you rarely EVER see the phenotype you're actually looking for... (especially when using a random mutagen such as UV radiation)... There have been times when I had used UV to irradiate E.coli in search of a mutation which knocked out the gene which enabled the cell to perform histodine synthesis, and out of about 2,000,000 cells that were irradiated, only 1 or 2 actually showed the phenotype...


----------



## Fishman (Jan 16, 2007)

Thanks Sara, I think I will try this in the summer. My larger frogs should like them.


----------



## james67 (Jun 28, 2008)

reptile jay:
know of anyone w/ vestigial or flightless house flies for sale, or will you be interested in selling F2 or F3 of your experiment? id be interested in culturing them to give larvae to Ampulex compressa. im trying to look for a good way to culture these without much more hassle than melos/ heydei/ springtails/ etc.
you say house flies can be cultured in a similar fashion to FFs?
any problems with parasites on wild type house flies encountered (any that could prove detrimental to FFs or frogs)?

thanks
james


----------

