Temperature Update #3/Photos !!

Today, 27 July @ 10am, in the last 24 hours, max. temp was 22.4C, min was 19.6C. Not great, but we do have crawl-offs, which means the pod was warm enough for the maggots to mature, and crawl off to pupate. And the silver lining about this issue with temperature that we are attempting to remediate is that the lower temperatures will slow the rate of maturation, so that not all of the maggots will mature in to pupa and crawl off next week. Also, it does not look as though the maggots have fed at all- the feed dish (which used to be the prized possession of Rylo's cat) is completely full.

Today the crawl off count is 3 females and 6 males. Again, good odds- the ladies have some choices! Hope they make the right ones, and we get those coveted eggs in a few weeks.

Again, there were no pest flies around the bucket (we were very happy to see).

And . . here are the photos!!

Photo 1: The BioPod. Here I am holding the crawl-off bucket. The maggots are within the large grey container, and when they are ready to pupate, they crawl off (through the silver hose that you can see hanging down) in to the crawl-off bucket, that contains sawdust. The BSF instinctively knows that as a pupa, it prefers drier conditions and that the bucket is the place to be.

Photo 2: You can see the sawdust in the crawl-off bucket.

Photo 3: Some pupa! The dimorphism between the sexes during the pupal stage is quite apparent- contrary to what you may be thinking right now, the 3 large pupa on the left are female, and the 6 smaller pupa on the right are male.

Photo 4: Putting the crawl-off bucket back on the biopod after transferring the pupa to the larger bucket with all of the pupa. We have upgraded the bird cage that we were using before to a large 5-gallon bucket.

Again, these photos were taken at UBC Farm.

Wish me luck on my presentation to the kiddies tomorrow!!