Take a bat fly, and cut the abdomen with a sharp scalpel. Make sure you don’t cut through taxonomically important parts (this is best done under a stereomicroscope). Put the entire specimen in Proteinase K plus buffer (we are using the Qiagen Kit), overnight. On the next day, take out the now empty exoskeleton of the bat fly, and proceed with the rest of the extraction steps. Mount the exoskeleton on a slide with Euparal (mounting medium you can get from BioQuip). This way you always have a specimen voucher to your DNA extraction. This is important, as sometimes proper identification is only possible on mounted specimens.

Bat flies are parasites, and they are hard to get. The best way to get them alive, and keep them alive for a while is to pick them off the bat with entomological light weight tweezers, and then aspirate them into an aspirator. In there, they will stay alive for 2 to 3 hours, sometimes longer, depending on the species. This gives you some time to observe them, and keep them fresh (e.g. for RNA work), provided you can get back to the lab in time. Unfortunately, bat flies do not necessarily lend themselves for lab rearing, even with a readily available bat colony.

Bat fly pupae are very delicate. It is almost impossible to pry them off the wall intact, once they have been deposited. The easiest way to get viable pupae is to find the place where most pupae are deposited, and hang some sticky pads onto it. Female bat flies will come to deposit, and get stuck in the sticky pad. They will still put down the pupa, which consequently also sticks to the pad. We are currently trying to rear out these pupae in the lab.