protein for fruit flies

[PeterF]

What are the pros and cons of the various sources of protein that could be put in FF cultures?

Especially cheaper bulk things like milk powders and soy powders.

Also, in the case of milk powders. Any differences 'twix skim milk powders and whole milk powders?

Any experiences of note?

 

[PhilinYuma]

What are the pros and cons of the various sources of protein that could be put in FF cultures?

Especially cheaper bulk things like milk powders and soy powders.

Also, in the case of milk powders. Any differences 'twix skim milk powders and whole milk powders?

Any experiences of note?

Another interesting question to close down the night with. The usual experiments on culture media for Drosophila melanogaster, such as those early in the last century that demonstrated that using yeast at 12.5% to 20% of the medium's total volume greatly increased yield, have always looked at fecundity and larval survival as criteria of success. This approach has the merit of being readily measurable, but it does not adress the important issue of whether or not some formulations promote predator growth more than others.

A decade ago, some Danish researchers (not entomologists, as it happens) did research on the effect of the amount and type of protein used in D. melanogaster culture media on predator growth and development. The first of these articles is in

Oecologia (Berl) 127(2): 207-213 (2001) Alas, you will only find an abstract there, and the publisher of Oecologia wants about $38 for a six-page article, but perhaps you, Peter have it in your univerity library's holdings.. The research tacitly accepts that the choice of filler carbohydrate, whether masa flour or tapioca is totally irrelevant, and explicitly, that "gut loading" has no effect on the predator's development whatsoever, a point that I have often made in the past but which will make little impression on the willfully ignorant (see how bitter I am in my old age? :lol: ).

Surprisingly, the best form of protein turned out to be ground dog food. I can say from experience, though (and so can Peter C.!), that the danger of this form of protein developing a culture of anaerobic bacteria in a 32oz pot is very high, so the second choice, casein, which I regularly use in such pots, is the best, I think, for our purposes. In later papers, the authors (David Marntz and Soren Toft) discovered that the type of predator affected the outcome (they used wolf spiders), but those with a short metabolism and life span profited most from this regimen, so it should be ideal for young mantids.

The fact remains, though, that the use of about 20% yeast by volume in the culture medium is important in promoting growth of the larvae and is obviously a rich source of protein and amino acids. In the first account I read of feeding adult house flies, powdered buttermilk was recommended, but I have not seen any obvious advantage to its use either as adult or larval food.

Finally, I think that most of us, if we think about the subject at all, should be looking for the most cost effective formula rather than the best.Paying $2 per pot extra for a formula that produces a 15% greater yield hardly seems to be a cost effective strategy.I shall be playing around with this in terms of yield in the u[upcoming year. I even might have a safe way to incorporate dog food!

And now, a quick drink and so to bed.

Edit: Well that was nice, but at the risk of being obvious that both the active yeast and brewer's yeast that I and a few others add are rich in the amino acids needed for protein synthesis.

At the moment, my mixture is:

31/2 cups potato flakes

1 cup active yeast (16.6%vol.)

1/2 cup brewers' yeast

1/2 cup sugar (to feed the yeast)

1/2 cup of casein

1 Tbs Paraben

 

[Rick]

I prefer commercially available medium. Not sure what is in it and I don't care. It works and that is what matters to me.

 

[PeterF]

Phil, I will look into the article today. If just to read about the poor research associate who had to weigh female fruit flies!

 

[PeterF]

Phil, I know you're popular with the kids these days after that duet with Bieber. But could you maybe make some room in your message box?

 

[PeterF]

"Significantly fewer spiders raised on dogfood flies had moulting failures compared to spiders fed control flies"

 

[PhilinYuma]

Phil, I know you're popular with the kids these days after that duet with Bieber. But could you maybe make some room in your message box?

Duet? I was the guy who redirected his video URLs on YouTube! O.K. I cleared out some of my fan mail!

 

[warpdrive]

Dear Phil,

I'm going to base my reply on chameleons as this is what I'm far more versed in and know more then mantids.

Gutloading does indeed have an effect on predators in such a great way that it is silly to quote or use outdated material that clearly didn't do enough research before making a determining finding.

Fist off, 90% of the feeders used to feed reptiles have a poor calcium to phosphorus ratio.

As a result, reptile owners are then forced to at least dust the feeders with a calcium supplement. Sadly, not all reptiles or chameleons can take such supplemental treatments. My Quads clearly can not. As a result if I want to keep such delicate slow growing chameleons, I am forced to do what is better then just using dusts and gutloading well with a high calcium rich greens that have little or no oxidents in them (they will prevent calcium absorption). I must also use fruits high in vitamins and veggies high in minerals as I can't use dusts with D3 or other vitamins/minerals in it as they will get sick from the dusts and could die.

Now because my feeders are so well gutloaded, I now don't have to use supplemental dusts as often for my faster growing chameleons or other reptiles. So as a result, my predators are far more healthy and secure then if I were to just use a form of chemical supplementation.

It's like you taking vitamin C in pill form instead of eating an orange. Sure you get the same vitamin C, but you don't get the calcium or the fiber like you do from the orange.

Gutloading is crucial for some animals (predators) regardless of your views or retarded outdated findings. It has been proven countless times if you just do a search for it. It makes all the difference in the world. If I were you I would speak to a vet or a true scientist on the subject. You could also speak with your doctor about nutrition and see what he says. Finally, I would speak with Kevin Anderson on the chameleon forums as he is at least a scientist that strictly studies chameleons...yet I think he is in Camaroon right now, the lucky bastard.

As for the dog food, IMHO it is the worst thing you can feed your feeders...and in many cases your dog too. Do some true research on the subject matter and you'll find that the ones in the know will tell you to stay away from it.

It's bad enough we humans eat far too much animal protein as compared to fruits and veggies. We ourselves need to learn how to eat better to live a long and healthy life.

Harry

Edit: I didn't make myself clear.

A poor calcium to phosphorus ratio when feeding your feeders to your predator (chameleon or other reptile) is one of the leading cause of MBD or metabolic Bone disease. Thus, yes, gutloading does in fact have a result on the pets we keep and anyone who says otherwise is just being foolish.

 

[PhilinYuma]

I think that Peter's question, Harry, which was placed in the "mantid discussions - food and feeding forum", and certainly my reply, referred to raising flies for mantids and other arthropods.The article that I cited --did you read it? -- is in a respected scholarly journal and the article was refereed, and it is one of an ongoing series published in this decade. I not only agree that gut loading prey for vertebrates is a long established and beneficial practice, but I believe that the erroneous belief that it works for arthropods is a carry over from that practice by folks with strong opinions and no facts to back them up. I assume that you do not take this position.

With regard to your humble opinion about dog food, the only complaints that I have heard are by those who say that it harms dogs and causes "hot spots". I have raised dogs for over half a century though, without seeing any ill effects. My ten year old lab (eying me right now) still frisks around like a puppy, but no one, I'm sure, would try to persuade you to use it if you don't like it. Professional breeders of house flies, though, like SpiderPharm, use it and have done so for a long time, though Chuck tells me that the quality of his commercial dog food has deteriorated and so uses supplements as do I.

I tend to go by results, though I am always interested to read a good article on insect nutrition. At the moment, I think that I am one of the few folks successfully breeding HF.s and BBs from eggs in any quantity on this forum. If you are having or have had similar success, though, a lot of us would like to benefit from your experience.

 

[warpdrive]

First off, let me just say Phil that I'm no expert in reptiles. Nor mantids or any other insect.

I have bread countless animals and fish, yet even with the fact that if you bought any pearl scale angelfish 10 years ago or slightly longer, in the north east, the chances were that the fish was one of my babies. Yet I still consider that I am if anything just an advanced hobbiest and nothing more in the categories that I know about.

I'm also not in any way going to talk about what are the best ways to breed many of our feeders for reptiles or insects. That is not the point or goal of this message. What I do want to talk about is nutrition and gutloading of our feeders for our predatory pets. I hope you have at least an open mind to what I'm going to say because you may disagree with many things at first and I'm sadly only on a blackberry at this time so posting links or proof is not going to happen.

I also want to say that when it comes to insects, I have far less knowledge then most of you and I would consider myself a rookie at best.

Ok then...

Over the past 20 years the chameleon hobby has changed drastically. I would even say that over the past 10 years it has changed so much it's almost not the same anymore. Books and literature that is at least 10 years old are still some of the best we have today, yet with all the great info there is still some outdated and totally wrong info in them by today's standards. Because of advancements made because of the internet, advanced scientific research, advanced vets, and hobbiests themselves, we know more today about chameleons then we ever did before. Yet we still know so little that we are still in the pioneering stage of the hobby.

With all our knowledge, there are still people who use dog food as a gutload. There are still people who think that such animals can only be housed in screen cages. Many still think that humidifiers are bad news. I could go on, but I hope you get my point that this hobby can be a strange one that thinks there is one answer for everyone as if we all live in the same state, never mind the same country and must all do the same things or we will fail our animals in question.

I see countless threads on the chameleon forum that state that their dubias are carnivores or omnivores, when at best they are opportunistic herbivores at best. I'm sure that one day I'll see a great video on youtube of a mass of dubias take down a lama in the wild, slice open it's throat, and devour it entirely. But untill that day comes, their classification still stands. Or crickets are the same way regardless that they too need protein.

There is by the way other proteins besides animal protein, yet I do agree that dubias do in fact scavenge dead animals and birds in the wild. Just like when an insectivor such as a mantid eats a rodent or a stupid goldfish in a video, it does so mostly because it has no insects to eat instead. Not because it wants animal or fish protein.

You my friend, if left on an island that had no animals, birds, or fish that you can catch, would still be a omnivore if after staving for 5 days you bend down and pick up some grubs to eat.

So when I began breeding many of my pets in the past, way back when there wasn't even the internet, I aalways tried to replicate nature as best as I can because I knew I would be close enough to being as perfect for my breeders to accomplish my goals. This included feeding foods that would make sense for the animal and feeder. It didn't matter to me bac

k then just how good or irrelevant gutloading was. I just did what I felt was best at the time for my pets. In the end, it not only seemed to help my goals, but since then I've learned that it was the best approach I could have done.

Today with all the research and hobbyists, the mantid hobby is still in the dark ages. It is like how the chameleon hobby was about 10 years ago. It's not that we don't have plenty of info, it's just that it is still so incomplete and in many cases baced on out dated material. Especially when it comes to nutrition.

Are you going to say that a mantid or a spider only needs the protein from the feeder and nothing else in order to develop a healthy exo-skeleton? What about a healthy muscle growth? How about good eye sight? Do you really think it all just comes from the protein that our feeders mostly contain? And if not, just how does such a predatory insect get such vitamins and minerals if not from dusting or gutloading?

Are you seeing my point just yet?

Now you might say that dog food is good enough. Yet then you are agreeing that gutloding is important. Yet if it is important, then why not give it something better then high amounts of animal proteins when that is clearly NOT what our feeders would mostly feed from in the wild? (In the general sense that is)

Why is it that many people who have flower mantids use bee pollen for a dust or gutload if the mantids don't need any nutrition beyond a form of protein?

It sadly makes no sense to me that insects that are insectivors would need no valuable nutrition beyond just protein, it just doesn't make sense.

To me, even if there is no scientific proof right now that our feeders may need to be gutloaded in a way that closely resembles nature, I would be foolish not to try my best to do just that.

So do I have proof or some links right now that I can pass on to you to read? Sadly no as that is not something I concern myself with at this moment, even if there was suck info out there.

As for the whole dog food for dogs, let's just skip that as I would rather stay focused on how silly I am when it comes to gutloading my feeders for my mantids.

Harry

 

[PhilinYuma]

I fear, Harry, that we are going to bore the living daylights out of many members of the forum with this discussion, but that's all right; discussions of what some members call their mantids and why, bores the l.d. out of me!

Sadly, I don't think that either of us will convince the other; our ways of looking at the hobby are too different. I cited one of a series of articles that was mostly concerned with the tritrophic utilization of protein. It delighted me, because I had always believed that "protein is protein" (animal protein, that is) and it was startling and very interesting to discover that I was completely wrong and that the type of protein consumed by a prey animal, here Drosophila melanogaster, can affect the development of a tritrophic predator, here, a wolf spider. Since the evidence against gut loading is spelled out in this article (the spiders are fed starved and "gut loaded" flies and the authors found no difference in the effect on the wolf spiders), and as you seem to put "common sense" before research, our discussion is necessarily limited, though if you agree to post your reaction to the article, I shall be happy to send it to you, since a member generously sent it to me.

If I understand you correctly (and this has to be a one time thing; I doubt that I shall be posting on this topic again) you claim that the only way to provide our mantids with essential nutrients is to artificially gut load the prey, presumably to provide nutrients available in the wild but not in captivity.

Many mantids do appear to benefit from the intake of pollen. There is an article to that effect that as been posted in the past by both katnapper (again, welcome back, my dear friend!) and me, but you seem unclear about the purpose of pollen. Its primary function is to pollinate other plants of the same species so that they can reproduce, not to provide food for secondary clients (bees, flies, etc that move it from one flower to the next). The pollen that a mantis ingests is carried on the hair, and in the case of bees, in the femoral pollen sac, not in the insect's gut!

As for "esential amino acids" not produced by the insect and that must necessarily be ingested, the fact is that they are absorbed as raw protein, broken down to amino acids and resynthesized as protein. Nothing very subtle here. Insects are good at breaking down and building up protein but are rather bad at excreting a surplus.

So the final word, Harry, is that according to all of the evidence that I have read and posted on this forum from time to time, you are wrong, if not "silly", to gutload your prey insects without a scintilla (love that word! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to use it!) of evidence to support your practice.

And that's about all I have to say on this. Take care, my friend. At least you are prepared to argue your case!