# Fruit Fly Wrangling Devices



## Teamonger (Jan 12, 2017)

Figured I might as well share a few of the inventive ways I've come up with for wrangling flight capable fruit flies. 

Firstly I've made my own version of CosbyArt's fruit fly blaster. This is awesome for grabbing small numbers of flies and firing them into habitats. Squeeze it into the fruit fly culture via your sponge plug, suck a few up, and you are golden.







That was fine for small numbers of flies but with an aquarium filled with over a 100 nymphs I needed a way to transport a lot of flies without ending up with an escaped filled mess. For this I created the contraption I have dubbed the "Murder Tunnel".






Pretty much its a 3/4 inch tube attached to two lids from the plastic glasses I use for cultures.
As I had already sunk the top of such a cup into the lid of the hatchery all I had to do was hook up the tunnel and watch the fruit flies pour in. There were enough flies coming out the tube that none of the nymphs could climb into the tube themselves. There was a bit of frantic lidding at the end but over all it worked pretty darn well.






Lastly I have a smaller tunnel I use to transfer flies from one culture into a new one.






This is inserted into the two sponge plugged holes (once the sponge is removed) to allow the flies to wander to the new culture. This simple design works but its not as easy to use as I'd like so I'll be making a second version soon to make it more escape proof.


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## CosbyArt (Jan 14, 2017)

@Teamonger Great to hear you tried the baster and it works great for you too. 



Indeed larger setups need more drastic means, for those I tend to just tap and shake my culture cup into the large mantid nurseries.

Thanks for sharing though it may come in handy for others.

If you are still experimenting try the feeder bottle from Denise. I use them for feeding my mantids wild caught houseflies/bottle flies in the warmer months, but have used them for fruit flies before too - just use the funnel as shown and shake them in the bottle.


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