Quote Originally Posted by Tzunu un View Post
Not intending or wanting to hijack this thread (so feel free to move if a new thread is started)

You are on the money with a goal of having the most nutritional fruit fly as something to be aspired to.

Unfortunately the scientific data comparing nutritional value of flies reared on different media are lacking, and this is a difficult subject to fully address by hobbyists as we do not generally have the availability of instrumentation and expertise to directly analyze the produced flies for various components of nutritional value.

So this leads to the information available (and that generated by frog owners) being primarily anecdotal.

Recently some commercial media is being marketed as producing "healthier" or more "nutritional" flies but again there are no analyses performed to determine values of components in the actual flies produced. Just 'cause you add it doesn't mean the flies are altered.

Additionally comparing frogs (often different species) fed on flies raised on different media (often where components / nutrients are not fully known) where the frogs are kept under different conditions / set ups is also chock full of problems in drawing firm conclusions.

There is a thread that has good / a lot of information on this exact topic started on another frog-centric forum (don't know if it's OK to mention other forums).
It should be checked out as there is some good information there.

I personally make my own media using the Frog Forum recipe on the "How To" section. I also add SuperPig to this to boost carotenoid availability.
I feel that most commercial media is probably similar in components and produce fairly equivalent flies.....but am waiting to see a real analysis of the flies prove me wrong.

Dusting and providing a varied selection of insects / larvae is probably the best way to insure good nutrition....until produced flies come with nutritional labels.

I agree with all of this and that is the crutch the hobby has to lean on. We don't really know what we can do or shouldn't do to help produce the healthiest feeder insect we can. Flies can not be gut loaded like crickets and start to clean off the supplements we dust them with as soon as they hit the tank floor.

I have read several articles and forum topics on this very thing and I walked away from them with the understanding that I (just some guy who likes to raise and care for frogs) lack the skills and knowledge to affectively alter the nutritional value of the flies I culture. This understanding has turned me away from home made medias and towards commercially available ones. I have settled on using Repashey Superfly. I personally chose this one, because of all the advances Repashy has made in Amphibian supplementation in their powders they offer. The ingredients in their media offers all of what I have read is good to offer the flies... Plus I trust their supplements to provide my frogs with what they need so I will trust their fly media to help make as nutritional a fly as possible.

One of the things I walked away from valuing the most is that regardless of media makeup the first generation hatched in a fly culture will be the healthiest generation in that culture. All other flies after that will not have as nutritional of media to start with. This can be physically observed in the look of the flies over the life of the culture. As the culture booms the first time the flies are all big and black (in a Hydie culture). towards the end of the cultures life the flies are small and sickly looking, they also appear brown.

This topic is something we will probably be able to debate and talk about forever and never really have a definitive right answer.