melanogaster fruit flies turned to flying?

[meganmcnerney]

Hi all, is it normal for a culture that is already producing when I received it to continue producing with flying fruit flies? I received my cultures the week after labor day and both were considered "producing" cultures. I started trying to feed the flies with both cultures, but one of them seems to be harder than the other. so I used the one that was easier until tonight. I went outside to open and literally hundreds popped out at me and flew around the lights.

did i do something wrong by waiting to really use this culture for a couple of weeks after receiving it? should I trash the new culture that I made with this container of flies?

[MikeM670]

Hi all, is it normal for a culture that is already producing when I received it to continue producing with flying fruit flies? I received my cultures the week after labor day and both were considered "producing" cultures. I started trying to feed the flies with both cultures, but one of them seems to be harder than the other. so I used the one that was easier until tonight. I went outside to open and literally hundreds popped out at me and flew around the lights.

did i do something wrong by waiting to really use this culture for a couple of weeks after receiving it? should I trash the new culture that I made with this container of flies?

Here is a quote from the following Care Article, (Fruit Fly Culturing, Care and Feeding - Everything you need to know about Drosophila) located right here on Frog Forum. It is written by Paul Rust and John Clare.


This is a quote from the article....

The vestigial winged mutant of D. melanogaster, perhaps the most popular mutant, can become flighted at temperatures above about 81 (27.5 ). This is because there is a malformation in a protein used for wing development, caused by their genetic mutation, and the warmer temperatures allow this malformation to be corrected. However, these flighted variants are still genetically "vestigial", and if they are allowed to reproduce at normal temperatures, they will produce the original vestigial flies.

I going to take a guess that either the culture became contaminated with a wild melanogaster or the temperature was high enough to cause them to revert back to vestigial flies.

[meganmcnerney]

it's probably the temperature...I live in Atlanta and we've had extreme weather this year. we've just stopped the 90 degree weather a couple of weeks ago, but the temps have been in the high 80s multiple days in a row. I think I will move future cultures downstairs to the basement and see if that works. thanks for the quick reply!