Fruit Flies Nutricional Value?

[mullberrysdream]

I was wondering how fruit flies compared to crickets. I just ordered a culture of them from my local pet store because they don't always have small enough crickets for my 6 week old, and he is quite skinny. How do they compare to crickets in terms of nutricional value? How many of them do i feed him at a time?

Thanks for the help!

 

[sandrachameleon]

They are not abundandtly nutritious, so you should dust them with supplement. Put a small amount of supplement in a shallow container (a lid from a container even). Tap the fruit flies into that, swish around to cover the flies, then either let the flies crawl out (if they cant climb well, too much supplement is on them) or tap them out or use a twig to help them out. Or just put the shallow container into the chameleon enclosure.

Give your baby chameleon as much food as it can eat within about 5 minutes, about 3 times daily.

Continue to offer crickets and other feeders (small silkworms, small terrestrial isopods, soldier fly maggots, flour beetle larva) as well.

You may find these links interesting:
http://bamboozoo.weebly.com/the-feeders.html
https://www.chameleonforums.com/diy-f...culture-21683/
https://www.chameleonforums.com/fruit...lturing-12441/
https://www.chameleonforums.com/droso...it-flys-19477/
http://www.dendroworld.co.uk/BDGarch...ruitflies.html
https://www.chameleonforums.com/blo...s-day-required-maintain-chameleon-weight.html

 

[ChameleonsInMyHouse]

Repashy has an awesome product out called Super Fly. it is a fruit fly medium/gutload. we all know how nutritional Repashy products are, so i would suggest looking into that product to gutload your flies with and continue cultures

fruit flies are a pain to suppliment, but (plain) calcium dusting is still a must.

 

[emilybier]

If you want to culture fruit flies, I would order from joshsfrogs.com. Their fruit fly medium is relatively smell-free (which is a problem with flies, very stinky) and nutritious with mold inhibitors. Make sure to get mite spray. Mites are a huge problem with fruit flies. Culturing your own is way cheaper than buying a new culture every couple of weeks. Plus you can split one culture into as many as 4 new ones and that saves quite a bit of money if you have a lot of animals needing flies.
I had been culturing fruit flies for frogs for a while but I gave up on them because I had a lot of mite problems due to my old apartment carpet

 

[sandrachameleon]

Repashy has an awesome product out called Super Fly. it is a fruit fly medium/gutload. we all know how nutritional Repashy products are, so i would suggest looking into that product to gutload your flies with and continue cultures
fruit flies are a pain to suppliment, but (plain) calcium dusting is still a must.

I agree the SuperFly medium is great. But the nutrition in the medium goes into the larva - not necessarily translating into the flies themselves. So yes, dusting is a must.