Flightless Fruit Fly Culture Care for Jumping Spiders

Usually, when you find flightless fruit fly cultures and the information about their care, it's targeted towards people who raise dart frogs. Dart frogs eat WAY more fruit flies than jumping spiders. If you order a fruit fly culture online, you'll end up very overwhelmed. Those cups arrive PACKED. 

The system I'm talking about today is meant to produce a manageable amount of fruit flies for jumping spiders, not an entire army for some very hungry frogs. 

This system uses two containers and involves washing and reusing the containers. Gross, I know, but it ends up being pretty practical when each empty container costs $1.50

If you get a fresh container from me, it'll have flightless fruit flies as well as the food for those fruit flies to eat. The food I use is Repashy Superfly, because it doesn't get moldy and doesn't smell bad. Follow the directions on the container to know how much to use. If you use less, you'll have problems later with baby fruit flies starving and not reaching the point where you can feed them to your spiders. The water you use does not need to be boiling. Boiling water just makes things take longer and introduces the risk of melting your container. 

Eventually, you'll notice these weird worms crawling on the inside of the container's walls. Those are baby fruit flies. They'll turn into seed-looking cocoons. After a few days, these will start to hatch into more flightless fruit flies. When this happens, it's time to move the new fruit flies to a fresh container. You'll either use a fresh container or wash out an old one. Any leftover fruit flies from the old container can go into the one that you're about to transfer the fresh fruit flies out of. You won't be able to get every single fruit fly out. That's ok. 

I wash my containers with Dawn dish soap. The washed container will have a very slight orange tint to it afterwards. That's ok. 

I add some repashy Superfly to the bottom of the new container, following the directions, but using plain tap water instead of boiling water. It's important that you let the water absorb into the fruit fly food before adding the fruit flies. Fruit flies are very good at drowning. You'll know it's ok to add them when the surface of their food isn't shiny anymore. 

You do not need to add anything for the fruit flies to climb on. They can't climb on the walls. Adding something for them to climb on just makes cleaning harder later. 

Over time, these new fruit flies will have babies in the new food. You never wanna use up all of your fruit flies because then they can't lay eggs. 

Feeding your Jumping Spiders: 

Place a plastic bin under both your fruit fly container and your spider habitat (both should be together in one bin). Tap the bottom of the fruit fly container against the bottom of the bin a couple times to make the fruit flies on the walls fall down. Dump a few fruit flies into the bin. Tap the container on the bin again, then quickly add the lid. Make sure it's pressed down all the way. Take the container out of the bin. 

Use a designated fluffy eyeshadow brush or paintbrush to move the flightless fruit flies into the spider container. If you put the brush on top of a fruit fly, it'll get stuck in the bristles for a few seconds. I give my spiders like 5 fruit flies as a meal. A few extra is fine too. If you poured way too many into your bin, you can pour some back. If they keep trying to escape the bin, you can tap the bin or use the brush to knock them down. For bolds and regals, I feed them when their butt looks like a pencil rather than a football. For certain other species whose butts always look like pencils, I just feed them twice a week. 

Spiders suck the juices out of the fruit flies and leave the rest on the floor of their enclosure or in their webs (hammocks). This is why I tend to give my spiders bioactive habitats with springtails and isopods. The springtails and isopods eat the leftovers on the floor. You'll have to use tweezers to get the leftovers out of the hammock once it starts getting a little gross. The hammock will probably get destroyed, so only do this if your slider has another hammock available. 

It's unlikely that you'll be able to get fruit fly cultures from Petco. If you look inside, you'll see that the cultures there tend to barely have any fruit flies alive. If you start running out, and you don't live near my shop, you'll want to order flightless fruit flies online. Remember it'll take the package a few days to arrive.

You'll probably end up with way more than you need, so it can be a bit overwhelming. The hay-like raffia in the container can make things difficult and sometimes the containers are sticky on the outside or the fruit fly food smells like vinegar. I haven't found anywhere to order a spider-friendly culture from online yet. On eBay, you might be able to message a seller and ask for a smaller amount of fruit flies with no raffia.

I sell spider-friendly flightless fruit fly cultures at my shop in Olney, Maryland, for $8. I also adopt out jumping spiders and let people decorate their habitats for $35. We have axolotls and houseplants too. Come say hi!