Cultures started flying

[cdcrocks]

I'm back again with another question with my fruit fly cultures.

I bought flightless melanogaster flies a while back and they worked well once I got used to tapping and catching them. However, over the last couple of weeks their hopping has progressed into proficient flying. I can just put them in the freezer for 3 minutes and that slows them down, but they wake back up in another 3 minutes and are flying away again. With 70+ mouths to feed, doing this freezer thing so often is fairly inconvenient. If I leave the flies in for much longer they don't seem to all wake up again, and I run out until more hatch. I haven't had this issue with the hydei, just the melanogaster, but I've had the melanogaster for longer.

I've got no other adult flies at the moment, so I have to use these. But is there anything I did wrong that caused this? I'm fairly certain that the flies were flightless, but not wingless. What can I do to avoid this issue in the future?

Thanks again for your advice and encouragement!

 

[PookaDotted]

A flighted fruit fly made its way into your culture and began breeding with your flightless. To avoid this in the future, keep the cultures away from the kitchen and from any other places you find flighted fruit flies.

 

[Digger]

What Pooka said

 

[PlayingMantis]

I had this happen before, and I had to buy a fresh new culture to raise future generations of flies.

 

[Paradoxica]

Yep, the flightless gene is recessive so once a regular fly gets in there all the resulting offspring will be able to fly.

 

[Ranitomeya]

Flightless fruit flies that have wings will sometimes be able to fly a little bit as temperatures warm up, but their ability to fly is generally not described as proficient.
It sounds like you'll need to buy a new culture and make sure that you don't have wild type fruit flies in the area you keep your cultures.

 

[Rick]

A flighted fruit fly made its way into your culture and began breeding with your flightless. To avoid this in the future, keep the cultures away from the kitchen and from any other places you find flighted fruit flies.

I think it is more due to what Paradoxica said.

If you can't deal with them flying get rid of those cultures and buy fresh flightless cultures. That is what I do.

 

[DinehCaveman]

I think it is due to rising temperatures, every summer my cultures have a some flyers and none will be flyers as fall turns into winter. The flyers don't bother me, I think a flying fly is more enticing to mantids. I culture my own melanos and hydei, I dont believe they've been cross contaminated as I have a small hole in the lids that I plug with a piece of foam, just like a feeding hole but smaller.

 

[cdcrocks]

All of my mantids except for one teeny nymph I found on my bean seedlings are eating larger flies and crickets, which I've had plenty of since I can buy the crickets locally, for cheap, and just feed one a day.

I'm keeping the flying culture of melanogaster and freezing it every day just for that one tiny lil mantis, I hope he feels special. I might try cutting out a plug in the lid to make it easier like everyone else seems to do. Will just a circle kitchen sponge work for that?