# How To: Fruit Fly Culturing



## zonz540 (Feb 8, 2012)

I've noticed a ton of people asking about culturing flies. This is how I do mine (by no means is it the 'best' method, but I've had great success with it over the past few years).

Materials:




- NEHerp Fly Media
- 32 oz. Deli Cups (I get mine from NEHerp as well)
- 32 oz. Deli Cup Lids (These type are what I've found to be best, they don't allow mites in or out and still allow the culture to breathe. They also don't delaminate or fall apart.)
- Loofa (WalMart, etc... for ~$1)
- 8" Paper Plates (Uncoated, nothing fancy)
- Baker's Yeast
- Brewer's Yeast
- Paprika
- Cinnamon
- Excess Supplements
- White Vinegar
- Water

Tools:



- 1/3 Cup Measuring Cup
- Pot to Boil Water
- Scissors

Steps:


- Cut plates in half (3 per culture)


- Cut loofa into 4-5" lengths (3 per culture)


- Pour ~1" depth of white vinegar into deli cups (different amounts for different rH% needs & climate, this works for me in Utah)






- Add cinnamon & paprika



- Add fly media


- Add 2/3 cups boiling water for each culture


- Shimmy cultures to speed up absorption of liquids


- Add baker's yeast


- Add brewer's yeast


- Add excess supplements







- Add plates & loofa

- Let sit for an hour or so (adding flies too early will kill them, let the cultures cool and dry out first)

- Done. Flies should emerge in 1-3 weeks (depending on type of flies & temperature of the cultures - melano are faster than hydei, warmer temps advance culture rate)


----------



## patm (Mar 21, 2004)

Just curious why you're adding so many ingredients to a pre-made dry media? What's the benefit to more brewer's yeast? Paprika? Supplements? My assumption would be that NE Herp media would be a brewer's yeast base just like most media, and that it would be nutritionally sound without adding extra vitamins/calciums?

Pat


----------



## zonz540 (Feb 8, 2012)

- NEHerp does a great job with their media, but adding additional yeast has given me better yields on my cultures. As I've understood, it is common to supplement mixes?
- The paprika contains carotenoids, which help frogs with reds to maintain their color (they tend to turn a rust color after time in captivity, rather than their natural deep red). I notice a difference in color after having had my frogs for 6-12 months. My redheads have really started to show some color on their snouts.
- As for adding leftover supplements, why not? Gut loading feeders is common and best practice in nearly all herp circles. I'd rather recycle any possible percentage of what is left over than just toss it out. It also gives another boost in carotenoids, as I supplement with astaxanthin with the supplements.
- As far as being nutritionally sound, yes and no. You can't add calcium and vitamin A to mixes like this and expect it to remain nutritionally viable for any extended period without refrigeration and other steps. Preferring to gut load, additional supplementation is necessary. It will work as a standalone, but I've experienced better results with additional components.


----------



## patm (Mar 21, 2004)

I understand what you are trying to do, I think what I'm getting at is it is usually the new froggers asking about culturing, and I'm picturing them running around collecting extra ingredients that may not benefit their culturing attempts.

I wish I could find them, as I know Ed has posted articles about the diminishing returns when loading cultures up with various vitamins. There have also been numerous discussions regarding the idea of 'gut loading' adult FF's through media additives. 

For now, this is all I could find via search. The quoted blurbs from Ed and Pumilo are rather interesting.

http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/food-feeding/251449-importance-nutritional-ff-media.html

And again, I don't mean any of this to be combative, I just don't want newbies to get overwhelmed thinking they need to run out and collect a cabinet full of ingredients to be able to successfully produce quality flies for their frogs.

Pat


----------



## Ravage (Feb 5, 2016)

Let's get back to the plastic loofa technique. Excelsior is cheap, but a pain, and I get really tired pulling little chunks of it from the dusting cup. It looks like a cone within a cone, but the pics are kind of small. zonz540, do you have a bigger pic of your paperplate/loofa lattice? How many cultures do you get from a $1 loofa?
I like the nutrition discussion here, it's good to keep coming back to basics so we don't forget.
Thanks,


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

zonz540 said:


> - The paprika contains carotenoids, which help frogs with reds to maintain their color (they tend to turn a rust color after time in captivity, rather than their natural deep red). I notice a difference in color after having had my frogs for 6-12 months. My redheads have really started to show some color on their snouts.


Paprika isn't helping your red colors .... All because something is red doesn't mean that color will transfer readily to the frogs. The primary carotenoids in paparika is beta carotene which is much better absorbed than the two red carotenoids in the paprika which is before we consider that beta carotene competes for uptake with the two red carotenoids so high levels of beta carotene actually inhibits the ability of the frogs to absorb and utilize the red carotenoids from paprika. The change to your color is due to the astaxanthin in your supplements, not the paprika. 




zonz540 said:


> As for adding leftover supplements, why not? Gut loading feeders is common and best practice in nearly all herp circles. I'd rather recycle any possible percentage of what is left over than just toss it out. It also gives another boost in carotenoids, as I supplement with astaxanthin with the supplements.


Once again, adding the supplements to the media is not a good idea and all because a hundred people jump off a building to impact on the pavement doesn't make it a good idea... 

Right off the bat, your actually harming the nutritional content of the flies as flies do not store vitamin D3 (instead it is converted to cholesterol), second the flies really need very little vitamin A to complete their lifecycle and most of it ends up in the eyes as rhodopsin, and biggest is that the flies uptake and store high levels of vitamin (tocopherols) E. Now if you think back to the nutritional needs of the frogs and other herps, you should know that the fat soluble vitamins need to be in a ratio as close to 10 :1: 0.1 of A to D3 to E and if the flies can uptake and store potentially hundreds of times the level of vitamin E in the media, you are going to throw this ratio out of balance and cause conditional nutritional deficiencies over time, in other words a bad idea. 



zonz540 said:


> Preferring to gut load, additional supplementation is necessary. It will work as a standalone, but I've experienced better results with additional components.


As a final comment on gut loading fruit flies, if your going to gut load any invertebrate, then you should know the pluses and minuses of the nutritional needs and physiology of the feeder insect before you go out and start making bad decisions and passing along bad information. 

some comments 

Ed


----------



## zonz540 (Feb 8, 2012)

Ed said:


> Paprika isn't helping your red colors .... All because something is red doesn't mean that color will transfer readily to the frogs. The primary carotenoids in paparika is beta carotene which is much better absorbed than the two red carotenoids in the paprika which is before we consider that beta carotene competes for uptake with the two red carotenoids so high levels of beta carotene actually inhibits the ability of the frogs to absorb and utilize the red carotenoids from paprika. The change to your color is due to the astaxanthin in your supplements, not the paprika.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Do you have some sources for this? I'm hearing what you're saying, and I trust your input from experience over the years - but this goes against what I have believed to be the standard protocol in the hobby for quite some time on adding extra or expired supplements to the media. I also know that there has been discussion on the paprika in the past, which led to me adding it to my media several years ago (I only started adding NatuRose within the past year or so, but have seen improvements after adding paprika prior to the second change?).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## zonz540 (Feb 8, 2012)

patm said:


> I understand what you are trying to do, I think what I'm getting at is it is usually the new froggers asking about culturing, and I'm picturing them running around collecting extra ingredients that may not benefit their culturing attempts.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




This discussion took place after I stopped following Dendroboard, so I wasn't aware of it. Honestly, the only reason I chose to post here was that it is easier to incorporate photos inside of the post.
I recall older discussions where benefits of adding supplements to the media were shown. Whether or not input from Ed was involved, I don't know. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------



## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

zonz540 said:


> Do you have some sources for this? I'm hearing what you're saying, and I trust your input from experience over the years - but this goes against what I have believed to be the standard protocol in the hobby for quite some time on adding extra or expired supplements to the media. I also know that there has been discussion on the paprika in the past, which led to me adding it to my media several years ago (I only started adding NatuRose within the past year or so, but have seen improvements after adding paprika prior to the second change?).k


Here's a start ... 

Cooke, J.; Sang, J.H.; 1970; Utilization of sterols by by larvae of Drosophila melanogaster; J. Insect Physiol. 16: 801-812
Draper, Harold H.; Philbrick, Diana P.; Agarwal, Sanjiv; Meidiger, Roy; Phillips, John P.; 2000; Avid uptake of lineolic acid and vitamin E by Drosophila melanogaster; Nutrition Research 20(1):113-120
Giovannucci, David R.; Stephenson, Robert S.; 1999; Identification and distribution of dietary precursors of the Drosophila visual pigment chromophore: analysis of carotenoids in wild type and ninaD mutants by HPLC; Vision Research 39(2): 219-229
Isono, Kunio; Tanimura, Teiichi; Oda, Yoshiharu; Tsukahara, Yasuo; 1988; Dependency on light and vitamin A derivatives of the biogenesis of 3-hydroxyretinol and visual pigment in the compound eyes of Drosophila melanogaster; Journal of General Physiology 92: 587-600
Nahida, Sidey; Mueller, Lawrence D.; The effects of ammonia on the foraging path lengths of Drosophila melanogaster larvae; http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~mueller/p...ce Paper.pdf
Wertheim, Bredgie; Marchais, Julien; Vet, Louise, E.M.; Dicke, Marcel; 2002; Allee effect in larval resource exploitation in Drosophila: an interaction among density of adults, larvae and micro-organisms; Ecological Entomology 27(5):608-617

The red pigments in paprika only comprise about 30% of the total carotenoid content and are highly polar carotenoids. To absorb carotenoids, they have to be bound up in a lipid micelle just like the fat soluble vitamins or they cannot be absorbed. Polar materials do not incorporate into the micells well and less polar carotenoids are going to be preferentially absorbed over those red carotenoids (and those carotenoids have never been shown to occur in the pigment cells unlike, beta carotene, astaxanthin, lutein, beta-cryptoxanthin. camthaxanthin .... ). This is in no small part why paprika sucks as a source for red pigments and a subjective evaluation of the color change is subjective to no small extent. 

some comments 

Ed


----------



## zonz540 (Feb 8, 2012)

Thanks for the sources. Looks like I'll have to invest some time reading. 



Ed said:


> This is in no small part why paprika sucks as a source for red pigments and a subjective evaluation of the color change is subjective to no small extent.



It's probably a good thing I stated that it's by no means the 'best' method, but it's worked well for me over the past several years - and subjective or not, produced results I've been happy with. That said, I'm very open to tweaking my process.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


----------

