Question About Flightless Fruit Flies

GOMER113 · Question About Flightless Fruit Flies

These guys obviously can't fly at the stage they're in when you buy them in those bottles at pet stores, but do they grow bigger and can they fly later in life?

A bunch of them have gotten away from me while feeding them to my bugs, and now there are flies in my bedroom and bathroom. These flies didn't start showing up until about a month after I bought some at a pet store. I don't know if they're just grown flightless fruit flies, or a different species altogether. I'll see if I can get some pictures uploaded, but if it helps, they're about 1/4" in body length and sort of look like the fly in this link: http://www.theonlinepetstore.co.uk/prod_show.asp?prodid=374

The ones in the bottle still look the same as when I bought them.

rosenkrieger

Their flightlessness is a recessive gene, so if you get one wild, flighted one in there, its over. You end up with a whole colony of flying ones. But since you say you see them a month later, I'm inclined to think something (like a dead roach or something) is attracting wild ones.

GOMER113

Thanks for your input. I do have dead roaches here and there in my tanks and when I find them I just toss them into the trash can in the bathroom, which is where most of these wild flies are located anyway. I guess I'll have to start flushing them now.

DeniseCasey

Make sure that they are fruit flies and not phorid flies.

Fruit flies have red eyes and phorid flies have a humped back with a striped abdomen. There is a noticeable different. I would rather have fruit flies-phorid flies are nasty buggers.

I did visit your link so make sure that the flies you have are indeed fruit flies. Here is what a phorid fly looks like:

http://doyourownpestcontrol.com/phorid-flies.htm

rosenkrieger

Yeah, I must've been out of it. I forgot to mention that they could be phorid flies. Either way, yeah, it'd probably be a good idea to flush dead roaches or otherwise dispose of them away from the house.