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Summary: Learn how to select fruit flies to properly culture them in this free insect video.
Richard Revis has been keeping and breeding poison dart frogs for over 10 years. He is co-owner of Black Jungle Terrarium Supply located in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where a...read more
" Hi my name is Richard Revis I'm co-owner of Black Jungle Terrarium Supply and today I'm here to on behalf of expertvillage.com discussing the proper way of culturing fruit flies. We have already gone over all the materials that we need and at this point we need to discuss the selection of the proper fruit flies to start the cultures. Choosing the right stage of flies to culture from is very important as if you use to young of a fly or to old a fly bad results will occur. In a situations like this this culture has been set up in approximately one week ago. You can see there are larvae and pupal cases on the side of the cup but the only adults present are the ones that were use to start the culture. Using these flies will diffidently shorten the life expand of this culture and will not provide fish and eggs for starting a new one. This culture here is one that was set up several weeks ago and although there are a lot of adults towards the end of this life expand of the culture is so not the healthiest to start new ones. The ideal stage to use for starting new cultures is those from the first initial hatching. This is culture that is approximately 2-2 ½ weeks old for the melanogaster and approximately 3-4 weeks for the Drosophila hydei both of these represent the most vigorous and healthy flies that the culture would produce and are best to use new cultures. By repetitively using the best cultures to start new ones you can insure that your lines would stay strong and pure. If you just use old cultures time and time again you individually your lines become weaker and won't produce well."
eHow Article: Selecting Fruit Flies