Fruit fly/springtail colonies advice

[Decompile]

I want to establish colonies for my droseras. Mainly Australian sisters.

 

[leck7S]

Any specific reason you want to feed them fruit flies instead of, lets say, betta pellets?

 

[bluemax]

As for springtails - I generally just put potted plants outside for a few months. When they come back inside to my growing areas they will have springtails with them. These are wonderful for helping Drosera seedlings/propagants get established by providing them with easy to capture food. It can be a bit unnerving to look into a terrarium and see the soil in pots swarming with tiny creatures that look like they might be unhealthy bugs. You get used to their appearance. You need to stay off of any insecticides as they will generally kill springtails too. Another way to add them is simply to bring indoors a pot that has been outdoors for awhile and put it with your collection.

 

[marklt]

I’ve got a little jar (2 inch maybe) with orange springtails (protanura sp) and I’ve spreaded them between my plants with just that little jar, droseras and baby neps eat well with them in the soil. I choose the orange ones because they are easier to see, and kind of cute. The jar has just moist peatmoss and when I prune, sometimes I add a leaf to the jar. I try to keep temperature at 64F and they are doing great, they reproduce fast, I think that is harder to kill them than keeping them alive haha

 

[FrankenSnyder]

Great info guys. Worthy of a thread of its own in Terraforums Animal Life forum. I accidentally got a colony of White Springtails (Folsomia candida) when I collected this wild moss from a local seep to plant with my sundew pictured in my Decorative Moss thread:

Decorative Moss

The sundew soon ate them all

I’ve been culturing wingless fruitflies for many years.

 

[AlmondMO]

Silly question, but how do you feed the fruit fly’s? I tried putting them in a container and dumping some ff in and inevitably they are loose ones in the house. Might not fly but they can jump

 

[hcarlton]

If you're dead-set on culturing fruit flies for the plants instead of sourcing some other option (which, the fungus gnats that invariably show up in almost any organic soil are a free source, appropriate fertilizers are easy to apply to leaves with droppers or needles, crushed fish foods of various kinds can easily be sprinkled on them as well), it'll be easier to feed dead ones to the plants than live ones so dumping most of the container into another jar and waiting for them to expire gives an easier to handle and ready-at-hand source to just sprinkle on them. And since the plants do not need to be loaded with food at all times, even one or two rounds of cultures will provide enough flies for a very long time unless you have a really, really big collection (I stopped culturing flies for ended lizard and mantis projects a couple of years ago, and only just now coming up on running out of the dead flies with a whole lot of other options lined up to take over the next several years).