Fruit Fly Culture Gone Bad?

[Julirs]

Can this happen? I noticed a yellow growth on the medium the other day, and maybe a bit of fuzzy white mold, and today I notice the culture is pretty soupy (and full of maggots-a good thing). This is some dry culture mix that is several months old that I mixed up almost 2 weeks ago and added flies. Is there a way these flies could be bad/contaminated/harmful to feed to the chams?

 

[Jonas]

Sure they can go bad. If it never did before, you have a good routine.

It seems like if the larvae get a good grip and get plentifull, the culture selddom molds or go bad in other ways, almost as if they prevented it. It wouldnt be crazy if they did.

I know people have used a tiny drop of regular preservatives (for making jam and such) to prevent mold.

I make sure to use a routine that involves heating all the parts in the culture to get a sterile start (I heat-cook my goo, I dont know what recepe you use).

 

[Fidel]

I had some cultures get really nasty a while back when I was experimenting with adding some different things to my media recipe. I fed them off and everyone was fine, but I didn't have mold though. I've been fortunate enough to never get mold in the 7 years I've been making fly cultures. I think I would trash the moldy cultures and not feed them off, the mold may crash the culture before you even get the chance anyway. Are you using any mold inhibitor?

 

[haleybobl]

I had a hornworm cup I just bought mold and go "bad" in a couple days after it arrived. The other one was just fine. I chose not to feed any of them due to the fear of hurting my chams.

 

[xanthoman]

i was researching ff mediums the other night and i read that it was ok to feed the ones with fungal or mold (fuzzy) infections but not the ones with bacterial (slimey) infections (but i didnt think to bookmark). i suppose it would depend on the type of bacterial infection involved. if i can find it again i will post a link. i know from my days of growing mushrooms (yeah thats right, them kind of mushrooms), that you were supposed to take extra precautions when dealing with infected cultures , particularly the slimey ones because they posed a potential serious human health risk. so i suppose the same would be true of chameleons and or ff cultures / edit/ i dont think its the link i was refering to, but, according to http://www.doylesdartden.com/fruitfly.html#CLEANING CULTURES it is ok to feed blue or geen fungal infected cultures but grey, yellow, black ones (are bacterial) should be discarded. a lot of these guys participate in a ff culture forum so they probably know what they are talking about / just for general info, two common ff culture mold inhibitors are methylparaben (aka tegosept) and calcium proprionate. one note when culturing your own ff, mites love ff cultures and to discourage mite infestation they should be stored accordingly , in a tray of shallow (1/4") water or on a board with fly paper or self adhesive shelf paper sticky side up. ff mites appear as barely discernable little white dots and usually infect all ff cultures sooner or later, usually after their prime, if you are dumping ff cultures, be careful you are not dumping mites as well, occasional inspection with a powerful magnifying glass or even one of them 30x hand held illuminated viewers from radioshack might not be a bad idea. just my 2 c worth /edit/ if you want to see an example of mite infected cultures just go to petco and look at their older ones