How do you prevent fruit flies escaping when feeding

[Jenny Reynolds]

I am a complete novice at keeping mantids but everything's fine except when it comes to popping fruit flies into their cups without the little so and so's escaping. What are your tried and tested ways please? They're sooo quick.

Also I've had a couple of flightless flies fly !! Maybe this is normal I don't know.

 

[Teamonger]

The flightless flies can still kinda hop/glide a bit they are not completely ground bound just almost.

Firstly you need to make sure all your cages have fruitfly proof fabric on them. I tend to buy shear ribbon from the dollarstore for this purpose but cheap curtain material or any thing like that you might find in a remenants bin at a fabric store also works well.

Second you will want to have some kind of little hole cut into your cages and plug it with a bit of foam. I tend to put these plugs on the lid.

Third make a similar hole and foam plug in your fruit fly cultures. I tend to put these plugs on the side of the culture container. This allows you better access to the flies as they gather on the lid.

Lastly make yourself one of these bad boys!



Then you can force it in to the culture via the foam plug, suck some up, then blast them into the cage with none or very very few escaping. It can take a little bit of practice to get flies into the blaster if your culture is not in full swing but you figure it out. 

Here is my thread of my fruit fly wrangling adventures. I was fighting flying flies however so you likely don't need nearly this many crazy contraptions. You can also see a picture of my cultures and their foam plugs.



Here are some of my smaller cages as well.

 

[CosbyArt]

For details/photos of adding a feeding plug, see the post below (but there is lots of other information too, even if it needs updated)...



With some old cultures, about 25 generations from making new cultures from the old, I had some FF that could fly. It was likely though from wild FF laying eggs through the lid - contaminating the FF culture. Once a culture is contaminated with the wild/flying variety, the flightless FF strain quickly becomes the minority.

The two ways to deal with it is to take the FF culture outside knock the flies down in the culture, and take the lid off so the flying ones can escape. The other way is to freeze the culture to kill them off, and start fresh with another culture that are flightless.

 

[Ocelotbren]

I only have a few mantids eating fruit flies right now so I haven't made feeder holes or any tools to help, but it hasn't been too bad.  When my Chinese mantids were small, they were in fairly large enclosures so it wasn't too hard to just tap some fruit flies in straight from the culture without worrying about escapees.

I now have some small ghosts living in deli cups and tapping the fruit flies from one 32oz cup to another seems riskier because some could miss the cup.  What I'm doing right now is taking the culture outside (so escapees don't matter, just in case), and using a funnel to tap flies from the culture into small deli cups.  If any get out, I coax them into the small deli cups with a spoon, which is easiest when they get to the edge of the table and I can just push them right in over the edge.

It's a lot easier to just dump all the contents of the small deli cup into the larger mantis deli cup without any spilling out; in fact, I haven't had any escape during that step yet.

Of course, I'm sure my method could get tedious if you have larger numbers of babies to feed, in which case the above suggestions are probably best.  Either way, good luck with it!