Molding blowfly maggot culture

[padkison]

I get blowfly maggots online and keep them in the fridge. I take small batches to mature into flies for feeding. Problem I am having is the maggot culture in the fridge molding. This drives all maggots to pupate and I don't feel I should feed the mold infested flies to the mantids.

Anyone have this problem? I am thinking of ordering mold inhibitor that is used for fruit fly cultures and adding to the maggots when I get them.

 

[Jay]

Padkison,

I am not the expert on raising flies but I do have some experience that I have had in raising maggots.

I have never put maggots in the fridge. I have only refrigerated pupaes. I would be hesitant to put too much mold inhibitor in a culture. From what I understand it is the molding of the culture that helps the flies to eat. I once asked a scientist who raised musca domestica (house flies) why my cultures would mold. He told me that I had too much food. He also told me that it helped to keep some of the medium from my culture frozen for starting new cultures. This may sound sick, but as I remember my cultures would smell a little bit like yeast when they were doing well but would smell sour when they started to go bad.

For your concern about maggots molding you can speed up the growth of your maggots by putting them put your over a heat source. This should help them pupate before mold has a chance to take over the culture. In a warmer environment they may also require a little more moisture and oxygen.

If you have mold on the larvae already I would suggest rinsing them out in some very fine screen and then feeding them off of moistened rabbit or dog food and a couple drops of milk. If you are short on rabbit/dog food a rotten potato will work too. What I would do is give the larvae just enough food to pupate, then sift out the pupaes and refrigerate them for when you need them.

One of the problems with culturing these insects is the maintenance. They are VERY low maintenance in their pupae form but are very high maintenance from egg to pupae because of the issues people have with the medium. An earlier post talked about raising houseflies. This is at:

http://www.mantidforum.com/forum/viewtopic...musca+domestica

Again I am not the expert on raising flies but if I ever figure it out I will definitely let you know.