# a different kind of fruit fly recipe



## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Ever since this post by Jeremy - http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/food-feeding/61610-great-fruit-fly-source.html - I've been messing around with a new FF media recipe. I was intrigued that this company used a yellow corn meal based recipe rather than the potato flakes a large majority of us use. I kind of felt that if it was good enough for them maybe it should be good enough for me.

So, I've been messing around with one of their yellow corn meal recipes and tweaking it to see if I could come up with something that would work for a small hobbyist like myself. So far my results have been very good. I'm getting a quicker hatch out and a significantly larger first hatch out. Haven't had them producing long enough yet to see if they keep producing for as long as my "traditional" recipe which is the basic potato flakes, brewers yeast, white powdered sugar recipe.

I was curious if anybody else has tried the yellow corn meal in place of potato flakes and what your results were. Or even if you're using something different from the corn meal or potato flakes that you're having good results with.

Thanks.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Hi Gary,

You can't really use time to emergence from pupa as a criteria to evaluate a media as this is heavily controlled by temperature and genetic factors. If you set up a new culture and insert a temp probe and track it over time you would see that the media heats up both through the actions of the larva and the microbes in the media. This is a variable that would have to be controlled as part of the evaluation if you are looking at time of emergence.. 

The number at the first emergence is also a criteria that is under a lot of control of genetics, number of flies used to seed the cultures and other factors.. 

As a further issue, numbers of flies produced doesn't mean that those flies are a nutritional optimum.. 

Some comments


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Well, I'll certainly be the first to admit that I didn't set this up as a "controlled" scientific experiment. No way I'm going to count out the flies to make sure all things are equal 

But, having said that, if I "in general" set the cultures up "basically" the same and they're all next to each other so temp, humidity, etc. are the same, and over the course of several weeks the corn meal cultures continually emerge first and the first emergence is continually greater does that then neceassrily mean anything???

I guess my thought process is that if this company listed in Jeremy's post is culturing FFs as a business I'm assuming they've tried a number a different recipes to get the best results. And they decided on this corn meal recipe. There must be a reason for that, correct?


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## sports_doc (Nov 15, 2004)

I think that if the only real difference is the base product [potato vs corn meal] the overall nutritional state of the FF's isnt likely to be that different Ed....???

If corn works, smells better, is easier to clean up....then that would convince me to try it.

Gary, costs? and where did you get the corn product? I'd need a bulk supply personally

S


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

sports_doc said:


> Gary, costs? and where did you get the corn product? I'd need a bulk supply personally
> 
> S


Right now I'm just working with small batches till I finish "tweaking it". So I just bought a can of yellow corn meal at my local super market. Haven't really looked into purcahsing it in bulk.

Of course I'm only making 3 cultures a week anyways Shawn, compared to your 300


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

gary1218 said:


> Well, I'll certainly be the first to admit that I didn't set this up as a "controlled" scientific experiment. No way I'm going to count out the flies to make sure all things are equal
> 
> But, having said that, if I "in general" set the cultures up "basically" the same and they're all next to each other so temp, humidity, etc. are the same, and over the course of several weeks the corn meal cultures continually emerge first and the first emergence is continually greater does that then neceassrily mean anything???
> 
> I guess my thought process is that if this company listed in Jeremy's post is culturing FFs as a business I'm assuming they've tried a number a different recipes to get the best results. And they decided on this corn meal recipe. There must be a reason for that, correct?


I’m not going to argue with you or attempt to guess why they chose corn based media (primarily as I don't have the energy) but as to your conclusions on production; I strongly suggest acquiring and reviewing the following articles as they provide a basis on why you shouldn’t make those assumptions without controlling for other parameters… 
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1758232
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/njz/1968/00000019/00000004/art00003
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/njz/1968/00000019/00000004/art00003
http://www.dbc.uci.edu/~mueller/pdf/evolution97.pdf
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1744540
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1420-9101.1995.8030315.x/abstract
http://www.jstor.org/pss/30152044
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1743512
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6436587

There is more if you choose to research it.. 
Some comments,

Ed


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

sports_doc said:


> I think that if the only real difference is the base product [potato vs corn meal] the overall nutritional state of the FF's isnt likely to be that different Ed....???
> 
> If corn works, smells better, is easier to clean up....then that would convince me to try it.
> 
> ...


In reality I would suspect that the corn meal is going to be a better source of carotenoids which can translate to a better source of nutrition in the flies. 
The main thing any new media developement would have to deal with is going to be the protein content of the media as too much will actually inhibit growth or if you have developed a sensitive line (say through using only first emergers to start new cultures) then the line will crash. 


Some comments,

Ed


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Thanks Ed.

No more comments from me. It seems the more I comment the deeper the hole I dig myself into 

BUT, I am going to keep messing with the recipe


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## dartsami (Oct 30, 2006)

Corn meal has been in use in genetic labs for culturing fruit flies for decades.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

There is a long history of different medias being tried to optimize Drosophila cultures.. for those who are interested I would suggest acquiring the following articles… (some are the abstracts some are pdfs). Corn meal as a media addition was originally tried as an alternative to the use of agar agar (and due to cost). There are a lot more articles but this is a short list of the various articles. 
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/3331/1/V43N04_174.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2456325
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/132/868/258.abstract
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2456324
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2457398
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2456772
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-185X.1950.tb00590.x/abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1259065/?page=1
http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-ANHU200903027.htm

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1761296 (note that this one shows that different genotypes do better on different media..) 
There can also be significant differences in production based on the age of the flies used to start the cultures as older females lay significantly fewer eggs.. however we should also keep in mind that using only flies from the first emergence selects for flies that are intolerant to the conditions that occur after the first emergence which is why people see cultures crash after the flies begin to hatch.. (these are also the flies that tend to have the shortest development time). 
Some comments,

Ed


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

You're THE MAN Ed!!!




Ed said:


> we should also keep in mind that using only flies from the first emergence selects for flies that are intolerant to the conditions that occur after the first emergence which is why people see cultures crash after the flies begin to hatch.. Ed


Yep, I'm always careful to start new cultures with flies of varying ages. Not all in the same new culture. Different new cultures get different flies from established cultures.


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## ETwomey (Jul 22, 2004)

Come on, this is ridiculous. Someone has some anecdotal report of a certain medium working pretty well, maybe it increases his yields over time, maybe it doesn't. He is not trying to publish his results, nor make any sweeping conclusions based on uncontrolled and preliminary observations. Who goes through life running controls and replicates on everything they do? As Sports doc said, if seems to work, that is at least useful information and may be worth a try for some people. 

I just wanted to step in and defend someone who was simply providing a potentially useful observation. So thank you, Gary, perhaps I will give corn meal a try. 

On a side note, I have seen that when I try a new medium, the first few cultures are strong and vigorous, but after a few more weeks/months, subsequent cultures seem to get less and less vigorous. So maybe you will see an initial burst followed by a gradual return to how things were before.

Evan


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Ric Sanchez said:


> I just wanted to step in and defend someone who was simply providing a potentially useful observation. So thank you, Gary, perhaps I will give corn meal a try.


Thanks Evan. I don't think Ed was really trying to come down on me. I didn't really take it that way. He's just MUCH MORE of a "scientific guy" than I am 




Ric Sanchez said:


> On a side note, I have seen that when I try a new medium, the first few cultures are strong and vigorous, but after a few more weeks/months, subsequent cultures seem to get less and less vigorous. So maybe you will see an initial burst followed by a gradual return to how things were before.


Hmmmmmmm................that's interesting. I'll be curious to see if that happens with me.


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## james67 (Jun 28, 2008)

if you would add your cornmeal recipe to my FF recipes thread, it would be appreciated.

http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/food-feeding/58634-ff-media-recipes-list.html

thanks,
james


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## Pumilo (Sep 4, 2010)

Hey James, I'll throw mine up there. I think it's a bit different than the norm.
Doug


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

gary1218 said:


> Thanks Evan. I don't think Ed was really trying to come down on me. I didn't really take it that way. He's just MUCH MORE of a "scientific guy" than I am


Just building on this comment.. 

Actually I wasn't coming down on Gary (and if you read further into the thread, I even responded to Shawn that there are good reasons to use corn as unlike potato it is a good source of carotenoids for the flies which can change their nutrtional value). 

The point I was making is that one cannot simply directly correlate production with a "better" media nor can we correlate faster time to maturity with better media without correcting for a lot of different variables.. 
In addition, both higher production and faster development also cannot be correlated with nutritionally better flies (in fact the opposite is probable) as this is affected by a number of factors... 

Most of the medias used in the hobby are judged solely on thier basis of "productivity" and speed of development both of which are highly affected by everything from age of females, genetic tolerance to conditions in the culture, better genetic adaptation to a specific media, genetic variations in feeding rate and conversion of media, the number of flies used to start the cultures, competition between larva and this doesn't even get into enviromental effects (and this is not an all inclusive list...).

This is why we see such great variation in anecodotal reports of success when attempting different medias... some people do get good production, some get poor production and some get great production.... yet these often ignored variations are why the use of production and time to emergence are poor methods to evaluate medias. 

When looking at a media, we should be looking at the following criteria
1) does it supply sufficient nutrients to grow flies
2) does it supply sufficient nutrients to optimize the nutritional value of the flies
3) is the production sufficient to warrent continued use of the media (yes this is subjective but if one reads through the literature on culturing ffs, one can find media mixes that allow very few flies to reach maturity)
4) does the media supply sufficient nutrients to allow for multiple generations to survive in the media (this is also affected by genetic selection) 
5) is the media cost effective (cheaper is not always better if one also considers optimizing nutritional value of the fly)
6) are the flies demonstrating any issues (such as smaller size (which can also partially be due to genetics). 

Some comments... 

Ed


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

I have used corn meal and/ or wheat flour in the past.

When I was testing other ingredients, I used a commercial media that was potato based next to ones with corn meal or wheat flour, or both.

Corn meal and wheat flour recipes are prone to mite outbreaks, but they tend to produce longer and explosively.

However, I have always used flies from older cultures-- mites or not-- and I have only had one "mite outbreak incident" that affected the actual production of my cultures.


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