Wild fruit fly for mantis?

[buddhacham]

Well, of course I had an ooth hatch unexpectedly early, and don't have any fruit flies. However, I have a compost pile that has lots of fruit flies, and was wondering if I could feed these until I got my culture. What kind of problems could I be facing?
Thank you

 

[xanthoman]

to feed or not to feed

i guess the first question i would ask, is are these mantis intended as feeders? wff wouldnt likely be a problem for the mantis, but if your mantis are intended as feeders, i would use only cultured ff. its easy to make ff trap by cutting off the top section of a 2 liter about an inch or two down from where the full diam. of the bottle starts, flip it over tape it on, put in some blackened bannanas and a dash of vineger+ a few crumbs of dry active yeast and voila, a ff trap. it can be so difficult and expensive to declare chams parasite free, i am really careful of jepordizing that. jmo

 

[buddhacham]

yeah definitely raising for feeders. I figured only cultured should be fed, but it was worth a shot. Local pet shop doesn't have any ff right now, and I'll only be getting my cultures next week sometime. I'll try to figure something out.
Thank you though

 

[Aaenson]

Maybe if you have roaches (crickets work too) Make a soup, I know if sounds nasty but I have done it and it seemed to be working well if you don't mind squishing them

Hope this helps
-Jacob

 

[buddhacham]

Maybe if you have roaches (crickets work too) Make a soup, I know if sounds nasty but I have done it and it seemed to be working well if you don't mind squishing them

Hope this helps
-Jacob

I was under the impression that mantis would only eat moving prey. Is that wrong?

 

[sandrachameleon]

The mantis will only eat live moving prey, yes.
They will eat each other as needed until you offer something else. I've used baby mealworms before, along with fruit flies.

 

[xanthoman]

hand feeding mantis

actually some mantis (including chinese) will eat cut up dubia or other properly presented morsels, with enough patience. my orchid mantis are mostly hand fed. but it can take like 5-10 min to coax a mantis to eat (if its even going to) so its not practical for trying to raise 100 + mantids. jmo / edit when feeding my orchids, i take a baby 1/8-3/16" dubia grab him wth a pair of forceps, cut him in half cross ways, so the little abdomen part is like a bowl and slowly gently offer it with a pair of tweeze that are just holding on to the tiniest part, so that no matter how hard you are squeezing the tweeze the mantis can still pull it out. i have never tried it with really young mantis, i dont think most mantis under 2 weeks would have the strength to hold on to it. orchid mantis will sometimes eat banana so this year i am going to try to get my chinese to eat it (currently incubating 2 ooths) just to see . jmo

 

[reptoman]

actually some mantis (including chinese) will eat cut up dubia or other properly presented morsels, with enough patience. my orchid mantis are mostly hand fed. but it can take like 5-10 min to coax a mantis to eat (if its even going to) so its not practical for trying to raise 100 + mantids. jmo / edit when feeding my orchids, i take a baby 1/8-3/16" dubia grab him wth a pair of forceps, cut him in half cross ways, so the little abdomen part is like a bowl and slowly gently offer it with a pair of tweeze that are just holding on to the tiniest part, so that no matter how hard you are squeezing the tweeze the mantis can still pull it out. i have never tried it with really young mantis, i dont think most mantis under 2 weeks would have the strength to hold on to it. orchid mantis will sometimes eat banana so this year i am going to try to get my chinese to eat it (currently incubating 2 ooths) just to see . jmo

Can you post a pic of your orchids? Sorry to highjack the thread.

 

[buddhacham]

Just thought I would let everyone know that I ended up feeding house flies to the mantis hatchlings! Got back into town and saw that the house flies I ordered from spiderpharm had started hatching sometime in the past two days so I decided to put 2 flies in with about 10 hatchlings to see if it was worth trying. Within about 10 minutes they caught both and were actually sharing them!! I was amazed. It's convenient because I have them in a plastic container from orange juice and the flies bunch together in the cap, and the mantis walk up towards the top and pick off the flies. It's like an upside feeding bowl.

 

[xanthoman]

mantis

Can you post a pic of your orchids? Sorry to highjack the thread.

i have already posted pics of one of them in the other pets section. but i will post some more pics later tonight or tomorrow. https://www.chameleonforums.com/some-pics-my-orchid-mantis-36708/index2.html

 

[xanthoman]

Just thought I would let everyone know that I ended up feeding house flies to the mantis hatchlings! Got back into town and saw that the house flies I ordered from spiderpharm had started hatching sometime in the past two days so I decided to put 2 flies in with about 10 hatchlings to see if it was worth trying. Within about 10 minutes they caught both and were actually sharing them!! I was amazed. It's convenient because I have them in a plastic container from orange juice and the flies bunch together in the cap, and the mantis walk up towards the top and pick off the flies. It's like an upside feeding bowl.

sharing the same fly could encourage canabalism, so i would be careful, its not like you can just keep an eye on them to prevent it, before you know it, one of their heads could be on the floor. thats whats great about ff (when mantis are communally housed) everybody gets their own feeder. if you are going to feed hfs, and you want to minimize losses, then individual containers might be best. jmo