Care sheet guide by DartFrogsAndGeckos.com

If you are thinking about getting started with dart frogs, you should be thinking about culturing fruit flies. I’ve got a couple of sheets on the site here that discuss the “how to” of making fruit fly cultures, along with tips and such for running a successful culturing program, but this little sheet is just intended to make a few points about why you should culture flies yourself, and some information on which flies you should culture.

So, first, let’s consider why you should make your own cultures. Obviously, a major consideration is money (isn’t it always???), most pet stores sell cultures for $10 or more. Your tank with two frogs is probably going to need two cultures every couple of weeks, maybe more. So, that’s around $40 a month. Then there are the issues with having a good supply, and being able to feed your frogs as often as you need to. In many cases, a pet store fruit fly supply is sort of an afterthought for the pet store, it is something they may have in stock a lot of the time, but not always…or they usually have them that are beginning to produce, but not always…so showing up at the pet store when you “really need” some is going to be chancy…

Another option, obviously, is just ordering cultures from a business, like me. You would think I’d love this, but honestly shipping fruit flies is a hassle! All too often, fruit fly cultures can be overheated or frozen in shipment, or just damaged by being jostled and roughly handled. To be fair, most of my orders arrive in good shape, but just when you need them the most, you run into some issue with extreme temps and your frogs go hungry. And, obviously, the shipping bumps the price up so that, for most people, it is just not economically feasible to feed your frogs this way.

So, as you can see, going forward as your collection grows, it will be more and more important for you to make your own cultures, this will go a long way towards ensuring your frogs health and long life, as well as increasing the chances that they will breed. It will also be considerably cheaper than other alternatives.

Once you decide that you are going to culture flies, you’ll need to decide between the two types of flies that are available in the market, hydei or melanogaster. Both are flightless, so no need to worry about that, but there are some important differences that you should know before you decide which one you want to culture.

So, first, melanogaster are the default fruit fly, smaller so pretty much all dart frogs will eat them, and they are easy to culture. Melanogaster cultures begin to produce around ten days after you make them, and they produce flies for up to 20 days once they start. You can run a successful culturing program by making one or two cultures every ten days or so. Melanogaster are prone to mites and making the cultures promptly with the flies from your newly hatching cultures (the ones that are ten days old) is critical to keep your culturing program going, since the mites have a longer life cycle than the fruit flies. You’ll find more information on the fruit fly culturing sheets on this, but this is critical, you are doomed to failure if you make your melanogaster cultures with older cultures.

Next up are hydei flies, they are a bit different than melanogaster. The first thing you’ll notice about the hydei is that they are larger flies than the melanogaster, and indeed this is a major limitation, since several categories of dart frogs are unable to eat them, including thumbnail dart frogs, and most baby, and many juvenile dart frogs can’t handle the larger size of these flies. Depending on the dart frog species, it can be several months before baby dart frogs are large enough to eat hydei. However, eventually your juvenile to half grown dart frogs will be able to eat them, and most adult dart frogs of the larger species love hydei, their larger size is a bonus for the adult frogs.

In addition to being a larger fly, hydei reproduce a little differently than melanogaster do, and this trait makes them a bit more challenging to culture, and in addition, you’ll need to make cultures more frequently, thus they take more time, and may wind up being slightly more expensive, especially if you are just feeding a couple of frogs, since you’ll wind up throwing out some of your flies with hydei, the cultures produce so much food over a short time that your frogs won’t be able to eat them all!

Here is the problem, hydei take around 18-20 days to begin producing once the culture is made, but only produce for around 5 or 6 days. It may not be immediately apparent what the issue is, but let’s say you have a hydei culture that is producing, and you make a couple of new cultures today, which is the first of the month. Maybe you have heard this time thing is an issue, so you even make a couple of more cultures on the fourth of the month, as the culture that you had starts winding down. You’ve been feeding your frogs with the culture for most of a week, and they are well fed…but now, around the 7th, your culture is done, there is nothing left in the culture.

Around the 10th you get desperate and you use the flies that are in the cultures you setup. By the way, this is fine, particularly with the culture made on the first, those flies will soon be dying and they have presumably done their job. Maybe on the 13th you use the other flies from the cultures made on the 4th…but now you are without flies, and sitting there waiting for those cultures to begin producing on the 18th…four or five long days with no food, and that is after you had to only feed your frogs twice in a week or more…this is not going to be good.

Then, your cultures do begin producing, on the 19th…so you feed your frogs and make two new cultures…so, you can see, there is an issue here, you have to figure out how to be able to make cultures again on, say, day 9, and day 15. This isn’t that hard to do, I’m just pointing out the issue.

So, in an effort to enable you to make cultures over the time frame that you need to be able to, I can provide you with a number of cultures made on different dates, so that you’ll be able to make your first batches of cultures over the 15 days or so that you need to be making them, in order to have a relatively constant supply of food…it is not that hard, just different from the more straightforward melanogaster life cycle.

Finally, there are a lot of ways to cut costs on making fruit fly cultures, like making your own media. As a vendor that makes and sells fruit flies, you won’t be surprised to find that I don’t recommend making your own media, especially when you are just getting started in the hobby. “Just mash some bananas together with some baby cereal, and you’ll be good!” Honestly, it is easy enough to make fruit fly media, there are a lot of different recipes out there, and if you stay in the hobby long enough for it to really make a difference for you, by all means, experiment with some recipes and find one that works for you, but maybe wait till you’ve gotten the handle on making cultures and feeding your frogs for six months or a year.

Overall, if you buy the largest culture kit I supply, with the materials to make 100 cultures, your cost for each culture should be around $1.25 or $1.50, and if you have less than ten dart frogs, you are probably looking at somewhere between ten and twenty dollars a month, and actually less, if you just have a couple of frogs and are culturing melanogaster. This scenario might run you less than ten dollars a month, assuming two cultures every ten days. Hydei are more expensive, since you’ll be making cultures more frequently than with melanogaster.

Another consideration is the footprint of your culturing program, how much space will you need? With hydei, and a small collection, say two tanks, you’ll have around 5 or 6 sets of cultures, probably two in each set, so you’ll have about a dozen cultures at any one time. With melanogaster, you’ll have roughly the same number of cultures sitting in your culture area, although if you only have one tank you could probably be at around eight to ten cultures.

Ok well hopefully this helps you to decide how you want to feed your frogs. Most folks who wind up breeding dart frogs, and have more than a couple of tanks, will want to culture both types of fruit flies. On the other hand, many successful hobbyists and breeders have done well just culturing melanogasters.

As always, I’m here to help, feel free to reach out with any questions on how to culture fruit flies!