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[Introvertebrate]

At the very least, paper plate pieces would suspend the coffee filters above the medium, preventing them from getting too saturated.

 

[Synapze]

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[Predatorhousepet]

Thanks for the tip. I'll give that a try. I'm getting frustrated with excelsior. Few things are worse than trying to tap out a few flies and having an entire wad of excelsior fall out! ? 

I know the feeling but it usually happens with cultures I bought from others. When I make a culture I roll the excelsior in a ball, shake out any loose pieces then push the ball a good 1/3 of the way into the medium and it does a pretty good job of staying put.

 

[Synapze]

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[Predatorhousepet]

Lol, yep. I try to get rid of all the loose pieces beforehand but it's not 100% effective, sometimes one or two will stay behind & show up on me later. However, it's not nearly as bad as it used to be before I took to shaking the loose pieces out. What I used to do when that happened I'd just shake out some flies into an empty deli cup, add a small amount of 50/50 powder mix* to coat the flies & keep them from escaping then use my feeding tongs to remove any loose bits of excelsior that fell in. I could take my time pulling the pieces out since the flies weren't going anywhere. But yes that was still a pain so I now I do my best to make a ball consisting of only long strands of excelsior to add to the culture so I don't have to pick pieces of it out everytime I need flies. 

Hopefully your experiments go well and you find a solution that works a lot better. 

*powder consists of a mix of 50/50 honey powder & bee pollen. (I think I originally bought some from MantisPlace.com but its not hard to make your own, I had to put it through a coffee grinder a couple times to get the powder fine enough for this purpose.) Then you shake the cup to coat the flies in the powder and it weighs them down so they can't climb out of the cup. I don't even need a lid or to keep tapping the cup to keep the flies in, they just stay at the bottom of the cup on their own, it's like magic. I learned this trick from a video about making ff cultures for frogs but they used calcium powder which mantises do not need so I tried to find something to coat the flies in that would be better suited to a mantis & happened across this supplement, I believe it's called Yen Saw's mix.

 

[Synapze]

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[Predatorhousepet]

It did take me a while to figure out what to substitute for the calcium powder but bee pollen is a good choice since it is full of vitamins and is in a form mantids would encounter in the wild since they prey on pollinator insects such as bees and butterflies. Bee pollen is pricey but as you said you are only using a very small amount so it's not like you need pounds of the suff. I suppose you could use honey powder on it's own, I believe that is cheaper but the main reason for including bee pollen is for the nutritional value. Maybe you could make a 25/75 mix instead so you don't use so much bee pollen?

While powdered sugar might work it's refined processed sugar and I don't know how healthy that would be to feed to a mantis at every meal. The cornstarch I would skip completely since it gets to a weird consistency when wet.

 

[Predatorhousepet]

I wonder if baby cereal would work if you ran it through a coffee grinder to turn it into a fine powder? It has lots of vitamins. I already add baby oatmeal to a mix I give my feeder roaches, so it's something the mantids get second hand from gut contents. Baby cereal comes in these super thin little flakes that could be broken down into dust quite easily in a blender or coffee grinder. Not sure if it would be heavy enough to weigh the flies down though. 

Another option may be brewer's or nutritional yeast? This is already an ingredient in many fruit fly culture mediums and is also highly nutritious. 

 

[Synapze]

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[Predatorhousepet]

Worth a try. Once you find some type of fine powder to weigh down the fruit flies it makes them a thousand times easier to deal with....many things would work but the trick is to find something that is also healthy for your mantis to consume.

 

[Predatorhousepet]

Also I wanted to add that flour is not a good choice. Earlier I watched a video on YouTube about eating raw cookie dough & why it is dangerous. Turns out raw eggs are not the main cause of food poisoning from cookie dough but rather the flour because bacteria grows very easily on raw flour. It needs to be cooked before humans can safely consume it so the same would go for mantises as they can become sick from bacteria too.

 

[Predatorhousepet]

I made a video of the fruit flies staying at the bottom of the cup for over 2 minutes so you can see how effective the powder coating method is. (They stay down a lot longer than 2 minutes but a 30 minute video of fruit flies crawling in a cup isn't very interesting.)

 

[Synapze]

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[Predatorhousepet]

Wonderful! This trick has saved me so much time and effort, I am glad I could pass it along.