Fruit flies

[mikeyboy123]

I always have a micro worm culture on the go for my Pygmy corys and chilli rasboras. Lately, I’ve noticed tiny flies/midges getting into the culture through the breathing holes and every now and then when I scrape the micro worms off the side I pick up one or two little midge maggots.

The fish go mad for them so I was thinking of culturing wingless fruit flies for their maggots rather than the flies themselves.

I used to culture fruit flies at school for genetics experiments and as I recall we just used to use a sort of ready break type stuff as substrate, but the cultures I’m seeing for sale have straw and stuff in them and seem more geared to harvesting the flies rather than the maggots.

I’m just wondering about keeping one culture going for a steady supply of flies and then transferring some flies to a separate pot of oatmeal for them to lay eggs so I can raise the maggots.

Anyone else do this?

[mikeyboy123]

Or is there a small worm culture that is easy to do? The micro worms are good but something a bit bigger would be good.

[black ghost]

I’ve never cultured any of the tiny foods. I think @Vale!’s your man for most of them. I tend to use frozen. Frozen lobster eggs are great for wee tiddlers. They’re the same size as brine shrimp eggs and one of the most nutritious foods.

Don’t feed too many maggots of any kind to fish because they’re very fatty (about 1/4) and too many will cause digestive problems, especially in fish like yours which would swallow them whole without breaking the thick tough hard-to-digest skin. The adult flies are a much better fish food.

Bigger than microworms.... whiteworms?

If you leave a few containers outside with a few inches of water in them you’ll get plenty of mozzie larvae (they start off very small) and other biddies... although the ‘season’ is nearly over now.

[mikeyboy123]

I’m bit wary of frozen. Adult brine shrimp and bloodworm are fine but cyclops, daphnia and bbs don’t seem to freeze very well and turn to mush which my fish don’t seem interested in. How are the frozen lobster eggs? Do they freeze well? I’ll look into white worms.

[black ghost]

You buy them frozen, in the cubes. Some of the frozen food companies do them. They seem to ‘survive’ being frozen very well and look all the same rich fresh colour when thawed. Hardly any mush at all, ever. Occasionally a part of a cube can be very much paler (freezer burn?) but it’s very easy to spot.

Most fish love them. I’ve even had foot long cichlids take in a cube, chew it for a few minutes, and not a single egg ever comes out again.

[Vale!]

I think @Vale!’s your man ...

The doorbell didn't work for some reason. Anyway ...

I no longer cultivate (flightless) fruit flies. I had a couple of goes some time back but found they were a bit too much of a faff - chiefly because I had much easier alternatives and partially because, after a few generations they sprouted wings anyway! Now we have a little bin on the kitchen windowsill which stores scraps until it's full enough to empty into the relevant council wheelie-bin thing (in which they breed but none of my fish seem to be particularly interested in either maggots or pupae). The little bin attracts fruit flies and I do occasionally catch some to put into tanks - this is a pic of the device, a hangover from my fruit-fly-keeping days, that I use for that purpose :



You suck on one pipe, the flies get drawn up the other and into the wee can and then you can empty them out wherever you want to.


A very good alternative, and much easier to culture, are springtails. All fish go mad for them, including small rasbora species and Corydoras - once the latter realise that they're there! I have two cultures - one generated from springtails found on my water-storage bins in the garden, and one of 'tropical' springtails which I got as a comparison (there are no perceptible differences). They're kept in tubs of the sort that reptile keepers put snakes into :




There's a layer of substrate (stuff that frog-keepers use) kept flooded with water (I use reverse osmosis water) and small pieces of cork on top of that :




Feeding is very easy, and I can provide details of what I use separately if needed. At feeding time it's just a matter of lifting one of the cork pieces and finger-tapping it over the surface of an aquarium :



They'll float on the water surface until munched. If there are floating plants, they'll jump on those and fish will 'stalk' them.


It sounds as though you need some kind of anti-fruit-fly defence on your microworm culture(s). I use net curtain material, thusly :



You have to buy it by the yard (at least you do in Milton Keynes market!) but it's cheap enough and works a treat.


Whiteworms I cultivate in a wormery/compost bin in the garage. They live distributed among kitchen scraps (excluding those, such as tomatoes, carrots and parsnips, which would otherwise attract fruit flies) and I summon them into bunches with little squares of white bread. Here are tonight's whiteworms awaiting dinner service :



For target-feeding to smaller fish, the baby worms can be extracted with a pipette ; otherwise they're indiscriminately tweezered into worm feeders and the fish choose the size they want. Like microworms, they'll stay alive (if not eaten straight away) for a couple of days.


I hope some of that may have been of help. Yell if you need more details.

[mikeyboy123]

Thanks for your very informative reply. Very useful info.

[black ghost]

Has he to yell because your doorbell doesn’t work Vale! ? (see if this one works). Through the window?
Member’s names often don’t colour up for me. I wonder if they’ve all been broken doorbells...

[mikeyboy123]

Thanks for the info on the lobster eggs black ghost. Will defo pick some up next time I’m at lfs.

[fr499y]

@Vale! to the rescue when it comes to creepy food