House flies maggots found in fruit flies media

[ThrAwNy]

This morning while I was transfering old fruit flies cultures into new ones, at my grand surprise I saw there were large house fly maggots in it.

I didn't think that house flies liked fruit fly media. Tonight after work I will see if I can keep those large maggots and see if I can keep a culture going with my media.

Did this ever happened to anyone before?

 

[Rick]

Did you just get the fruit flies? If it came from a place that cultures both I guess it's possible they got mixed.

 

[infinity]

Hasn't happened to me... but you bring up an interesting point... Fruitfly medium I'm surprised at UNLESS it was made with a lot of yeast. Maybe the dying yeast produces the same sort of rotting smell that meat gives off - possibly attractive the houseflies...

If anyone buys enough yeast to try this out- let me know - the yeast/ freshly baked bread smell to raise houseflies would be way better than rotting meat...

 

[wuwu]

rotting meat? don't people just use dog or cat food?

 

[infinity]

yeah but either way, not the nicest smelling stuff...

 

[ThrAwNy]

It was an old fruit fly culture and it did sort of smell cheesy I guess. I had forgotten to close up the lid properly one day while I was feeding my fishes with the extra. the next day I had thousands of fruit fly running around in the kitchen, a house fly probaby laid her eggs in there.

I will deffenitly give it a try at culturing them.

 

[jonpat83]

I managed to raise a few curly wing flies in fruit fly medium, I think it was because there were a lot of dead fruit flies so they were a food source as well as the medium, they were not as big as curly wings are usually

 

[chun]

I've had a similar experience, which involved an old dead fruitfly culture suddenly reviving with bigger "greenbottle" sized flies. At the time i was desperate for flies to feed to my Gongylus, so the timing couldnt have been better

I think it could have been the moutain of fruitfly corpses that attracted these flies to breed in my medium. Or they were flies which feeds/breeds on fruits, they didnt look like the common house/greenbottle/bluebottle flies. In my garden, i have a plum tree with rotting or overripened plums which usually attracts alot of these grey flies with darkish bands on its abdomen.

Let us know what happens

x

edit: changed a spelling mistake

 

[ThrAwNy]

Thanks Chun,

Your story sound similar to mine. Yes it's in an old culture with lots of dead flies, so maybe that's is one extra factor that keeps them fed.

I didn't have the guts to look into this culture last night, tomorrow I am off and will bring that culture outside and try different medias to see if one would work.

Yes we do have those sort of grey flies alot these days, must be the same as your sort of flies

 

[ThrAwNy]

I brought another old fruit flies media outside and got some house flies laying eggs in it, I took the pupas out when they were ready and placed thm in a large container with a fresh media. I had about 30 adult flies in there that lived for about 3 weeks, they seem to eat the media but I didn't see any maggots.

I think the secret to success here is that you need to use an old fruit fly media for the house fly maggots to feed on. So next time I will try it and see if it will work, unfortunatly it's fall and migt not be able to redo the experiment this year.

I will let you know if I ever succeed.