# Um what happened to my fruit fly culture?



## Lono (Jul 5, 2020)

Ok this is weird, so i've been breeding hydei fly cultures for a long time and recently my culture stopped producing larvae...not sure why but i had a boom then no more larvaes despite lots of medium still left. I took the remaining flys and moved to a new culture but i didn't notice it till late so there wasn't much left. Eventually new some larvae showed up in the new culture but not nearly as much as usual and all the larvae were dark grey, looked the same but grey instead of white. Anyways i continued monitoring it and regular larvae never showed up...the remaining flys have almost died out. Anyways the grey larvae pupated, look the same as normal ones but didn't grow as big as normal ones and are darker in color. They just hatched today and a totally different bug hatched. I've never seen them before they look like small beetles with a small front end and round back end they have clear wings but i haven't seen any fly. I'm not sure how this happened those beetles were never in the culture and i've never even seen one before. Anyone know what these are and what happened?


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## MantisGirl13 (Jul 5, 2020)

Pics? 

- MantisGirl13


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## hibiscusmile (Jul 5, 2020)

Yea cant tell from the description, how often are you making new cultures? It does can of sound like a fruit fly going bad,

I have seen this before, but maybe it is a type of mite or beetle, who knows?


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## Lono (Jul 5, 2020)

i doubt i can take a pic, i only have a cellphone for pics and i usually cant even get it to focus enough to get a good pic of a baby mantis. these are about the size of a melogaster and black would probably look like a black line if i take a pic. i'll give it a shot though, if it doesnt work i'll draw a quick sketch of it. it's just so wierd that i've never seen this bug in the culture at all and i was monitoring them cause of the lack of larvae. 

for cultures i only have 2 going at any time. I just like to have one producing so i'll have that one and then a fresh one going to try and time it to produce when the other one stops.


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## Lono (Jul 5, 2020)

ok the pics seem decent. Also they can fly, they fly really slow.


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## Mystymantis (Jul 6, 2020)

They look kind of like a weevil. Perhaps a stored grain pest type weevil? I can't really tell clearly what it is though. Do they have snouts on the front of their head? How long are they?

If they are a type of grain weevil maybe they came from making a batch of the food?


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## Lono (Jul 6, 2020)

no they don't have that weevil snout, that first pic was a little weird i can see how it looks like it does, i think that one was missing 1 antenna and was cleaning a foot or something when i took the pic. but they have small pin heads with 2 antenae. They are porbably a fly they dont seem to have hard shells and have wing flys they just look shiny black so had a beetle look to them. There smaller then a hydei but around the same size as melanogaster, i have noticed something odd, they've been mating in there and when they do they attach there butts to each other and walk around like 1 bug like a caterpillar, they move really fast like that too. I am suspecting some contamination now, i found 5 of these today in my room that i keep the culture and pretty sure only 1 or 2 escaped when i opened it to take the pic. I didn't see a single one in the culture beforehand but maybe one got in and layed eggs then died in the medium or something and it's just a coincidence the hydei went sterile when that happened? On this culture i had holes poked in the vents but the holes are too small for them to fit through, i don't know if one could have dropped its eggs in there or something? i think flys do that? 

But my newly hatched chinese mantis's love them so i just kinda have a new bug culture going at the moment, wish they didn't fly though.


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