# Advice from a Mantis Scientist: Houseflies in Condensed Milk



## ArcticMantis (Aug 7, 2019)

Hey all,

I've been raising ~100 mantises for my master's thesis, and as such I have access to people who are much smarter than me who have raised THOUSANDS of praying mantises for behavioural experiments. One of them used to work in D.D. Yager's mantis lab (which, upon finding out, I half shouted "REALLY?!?!??!!!!!", bc D.D. Yager is a big name in my field), and he recommended a novel way of getting mantis food that I haven't seen on here. I thought I would share, since it seems like a great alternative to other, more expensive feeding methods.

Basically, you get a dish of condensed milk (sweet, sugary, full of delicious fat) and put it out where there are house flies buzzing around. Leave it for a few hours, letting the flies lay their eggs in the medium, and then move the plate into an enclosure. The eggs will hatch into larvae, which will eat the condensed milk and then pupate into adults. Sadly, there aren't wingless/ flightless houseflies widely available, the way there are with fruit flies, but I've been assured that if I just pop a few of them into the fridge for a while, they become super easy to handle and distribute to the mantises. 

This is awesome because, 1) it's cheap as heck, especially compared to buying the 400 crickets/ week I would otherwise need, 2) this is less likely to introduce disease to your mantises than pet store crickets which, I have been told, are notorious for carrying diseases/ bacterial/ fungal infections,  and, 3) Mantises catch flies SO MUCH FASTER than crickets, because flies move around a bunch. 

I haven't tried this out yet, since my Chinese mantises are still L2s and would probably lose a fight against a house fly, but I'm planning to. If anyone knows anything about this method (tips, drawbacks, timelines), I want to hear about it!


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## MantisGirl13 (Aug 7, 2019)

Wow! Amazing idea!!

- MantisGirl13


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## hysteresis (Aug 8, 2019)

We have so many smaller flies and green flies which I presume to be GBF in the back yard. As I eye my i1 violin nymphs, and two idolo ooths, I wonder if I can rig something up to deal with this? I do have some fresh HF pupae coming in next week from a pal, so that should keep the violins anyway. Maybe I should set some aside and try this. Do ramps work for harvesting HF pupae (like BSF culturing)? 

My i4 idolos are good with BBF so...


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