Fighting Free-roaming Fruit Flies

The biggest (and most would argue only) drawback to keeping Dart Frogs is escaped fruit flies. There is nothing worse than feeling a fruit fly crawl over your arm or hear your guests comment on the amount of bugs in your house. There is, however, no reason for your house to be crawling with fruit flies no matter how large or small your Dart Frog collection is. Here is a list of a few things I do to keep down on loose fruit flies.

There is nothing worse than dropping a cup full of fruit flies and have them spill all over your floor. Keep a vacuum or shop vac near your tanks. If you have never dropped a cup of flies, don’t worry. You will someday.

Every time you feed your frogs your flies will make a quick dash towards your light and out every crack, vent, and crevice in your tank. For this reason, I have no vents on any of my tanks (they get air flow when I open them up every day). I also seal the none moving parts of my lids with silicon to keep flies from escaping (especially the aquarium lids that have the plastic back).

I also keep a glass of apple vinegar in my frogroom. The flies flock to this cup and quickly drown. I don’t like the smell of vinegar, so I only put an inch or so of it in the corner and change it weekly.

Finally, I allow free-roaming spiders to set-up webs by my tanks. I wipe away any webs that get in my viewing area, but I allow them to create webs out of plain sight.
If these steps are taken, you will find that you rarely (if ever) see any free-roaming fruit flies. Do you have any methods that I haven’t listed? If so, please shoot me a comment with your techniques.

Vacation

I have decided to do my own Blog. In this blog I want to talk about my take on the care of the poison dart frogs, discuss my take on new trends in the hobby, and talk a little about the business aspects of poison dart frogs and supplies.

I’m on vacation this week, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the hobby on vacation. The first aspect a dart frog keeper needs to worry about is making sure they have enough to feed their frogs when they are gone, but also enough to feed their frogs when they get back. A lot of hobbyists find themselves in the awkward position of not making cultures before they leave and coming back home to find that they are in a fruit fly crisis. I recommend that hobbyists order a few freshly started cultures two weeks before they are planning on getting back (so they are teeming with flies when they get back).

The Second aspect that needs to be taken care of is vacation feeding. There are many options out there, but I prefer to use the easy method. I just take a fruit fly culture, drill a hole in the side, and pop it in the tank. I use older cultures that are near the end of their life so that the frogs aren’t overrun with flies.

The final aspect is someone to care for your frogs. You need someone to check on and feed your eggs/tadpoles if you are going to be gone for more than a few days. In most cases they will need to check temps as well. If a cold front or a heat wave comes while you are gone, you could come home to dead frogs.