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ninjewtsu posted:i'm in the position of knowing basically nothing about ant farms and just kinda wanting to do it on a whim. definitely don't want to colonize my yard or anything with them, ideally they're as contained within the farm as possible (idk if the landlord or my roommates would be super happy with me otherwise). i'm mostly just thinking about it because earlier you mentioned that if it doesn't work out, it's really easy to just release them back into the wild no harm no foul Oh yes, you can release ants that live nearby anyways at any given time if you end up being sick of them. The only exception is if you want to get ants that don't live at your place, like tropical ants when you're in a temperate place, as those can end up being very invasive and cause trouble. Ants as pets are not only ridiculously cheap in setup, but even more so in maintenance. You need to make sure that they have water around (I have to refill uh, maybe once a week? Actually less than that even), honey or sugar water which needs to be replaced maybe once a month just to avoid too many bacteria chilling in there, and protein food like insects, usually around once a week depending on the colony size. As long as they have honey and water around, you can forget about having them just fine, they won't even notice. If you forget to give them insects, no worries, they can go weeks without insects as the worst case would be the queen stops laying eggs and the larvae stay small, which is not great but not deadly. Honey doesn't spoil so forgetting about that doesn't matter as long as they have something around (they can go around a week or two without any food intake if everything would be empty), just water is vital and for the first year or so if you keep them in a test tube you can even forget about water as they have their own water tank inside the test tube they can and will drink from. Especially the first year is very very low maintenance. You usually don't see many ants often, you don't have to worry about food really (it takes less than 10 minutes depending on your setup and has to be done maybe once a week), you don't need to clean their stuff as they do that for you, you only have to regularly check that a) they have food and water around and b) their junkyard gets emptied out before it starts to rot. Everything else the ants will do on their own. There are no maintenance costs either assuming the water isn't really expensive and one normal glass of honey lasts for, like, a year for them, probably longer (i eat from the honey, too and I take way more than they ever could) and if you breed some sort of feeder insect, even those are free. If you don't, you can just buy them (fruit flies for example) every now and then for a dollar or two at any reptile store. Depending on what insects you keep for them as food, they are a lot higher maintenance than the ants themselves, but especially in the beginning you hardly need anything at all and insects like flies are naturally super easy to keep. I even worked my way around breeding or buying insects in the first year by using a life trap for flies where they can't leave from and don't get harmed, always had enough flies available, never had to worry about them and the bait was just a bit of growing yeast. Basically in terms of keeping ants it's similar to keeping arachnids or very low maintenance reptiles, just without any initial setup costs. This changes very slowly as the colony grows and when you should start to give them more after maybe a year or two, but even then it's still just an Every Other Day thing. Note that temperate ants who need to hibernate during winter will be exactly 0 effort from October to March. Last winter I had so few things to do due to my ants sleeping in my fridge that I decided to get another terrarium and get some snails, which I later swapped out with another new tank in which now Hector, a scorpion, lives. So yeah, it's easy.
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Jul 23, 2020 10:36
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In monogynous species, what happens when the queen dies? Does that mean curtains for the colony and it basically lives on through the daughter colonies founded all over the place by the winged queens, or is there some way for them to have a succession?
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Jul 23, 2020 14:57
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aphid_licker posted:In monogynous species, what happens when the queen dies? Does that mean curtains for the colony and it basically lives on through the daughter colonies founded all over the place by the winged queens, or is there some way for them to have a succession? None at all. All eusocial species with a single mother figure in their center have this problems and only bees really managed to adapt beyond that and fix it by creating new queens. Ants cannot do that and polygynious species did not invent their way of life to fix it either, it's just a logical conclusion that it's not that much of a problem for them. Monogynious species basically chose to prefer their own genetic material by being exclusive and staying on their own and they pay that with the danger of the queen dying and the colony consequently also dying. If the queen is dead for any reason at all, the colony is doomed to die out slowly. Workers will bury the queen, brood will be raised and if they are lucky and they managed to already spread their genes via alates prior or during her death, great, but those new queens will not come home to replace her and the remaining workers would not accept them either. The colony will function normally once the queen is gone, but due to the lack of new babies they will slowly die out with no way to replace the lost queen and no reproduction happening anymore. The only exception to this are very rare cases of closely related monogynious species that, if they meet each other and find that another colony is without a queen, the queenless workers might accept another colony and join them, leaving their old nest behind. This is not really a fix to the problem, as genetically they still died out and cannot spread their stuff anymore, but at least the royal guard ants get something to do again. There are technically monogynious species that have not yet developed a biological difference between workers and queens among primal ants in Australia, where they fight over who gets to be queen via civil war and ant game of thrones, I posted about that earlier ITT, those solo-ruling queens are called gamergates. They do not tolerate other queens though and are thus technically monogynious. If those die, another civil war breaks lose to settle the question of succession. For more advanced ant species though, which is almost all ants except primal ones, this is impossible and thus a queen's death means a colony's death.
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Jul 23, 2020 15:17
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Will a young queen ever move into an old abandoned nest as being a convenient already-dug-out location?
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Jul 24, 2020 06:25
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The Lone Badger posted:Will a young queen ever move into an old abandoned nest as being a convenient already-dug-out location? Oh yes! Depends on the dimension of the nest, but many species will take whatever works. Large abandoned nests are probably too big for them (big spaces make them uncomfortable), but a single chamber will certainly work fine. They often do this for abandonded bee or wasp hives, too.
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Jul 24, 2020 10:13
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Have you considered having termites? Bees?
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Jul 24, 2020 11:41
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Per posted:Have you considered having termites? Bees? Oh absolutely, if I had the space for them I'd probably would have both. For bees though I need a spot of green land with plants around which I simply don't have as I live in a big city and so far I haven't felt like renting a garden or something for that, even though it never was entirely off the table. Might get into that at some point, too, just because it's fun and they're so fascinating. We do have a couple of bee hives from the university though, so that's cool, too. Hell, I'd even consider wasps to be entirely honest, I know they are not fan favorites but they are just as interesting and special as bees. Termites would also be quite nice, they have a unique social structure that is not haplodiploid and thus features various genders in one colony, plus they get so numerous in no time. Problem there is the space that they need, as they tend to grow larger than ants and need more space and also a special habitat that I cannot properly offer here. They would need a rather big enclosure with very high humidity and temperature, with low changes from night to day, which is expensive to accomplish in central Europe. Plus I have not a lot of room and a tiny flat, the ants and the scorpion I can easily keep at the window, but going even bigger than those would be impractical, so it currently is not an option. If I move, I wouldn't rule it out though. The setup for termites is expensive and so is maintenance, but they are very low effort as they just eat wood and the humidity and water can be done automatically.
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Jul 24, 2020 12:13
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It's kinda wild from a resource standpoint that you're (as the species of ants in question) basically throwing out a perfectly good colony with all the shitload of workers and physical infrastructure and stuff. Like if the colony has managed to survive through the entire natural lifespan of the queen the location was probably pretty good.
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Jul 24, 2020 19:23
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Are there any interactions between ants and bees or wasps or termites? Or do they just occasionally war with each other same as they would vs any other animal Do ants ever kill people
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Jul 24, 2020 20:05
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ninjewtsu posted:Are there any interactions between ants and bees or wasps or termites? Or do they just occasionally war with each other same as they would vs any other animal Ants kill people pretty infrequently excepting cases of infants/the elderly that can’t escape and anaphylactic shock cases due to allergies. It’s like 30/year in the US for example.
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Jul 24, 2020 22:51
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aphid_licker posted:It's kinda wild from a resource standpoint that you're (as the species of ants in question) basically throwing out a perfectly good colony with all the shitload of workers and physical infrastructure and stuff. Like if the colony has managed to survive through the entire natural lifespan of the queen the location was probably pretty good. True, but resource management is surprisingly not really a thing for ants in general. Darwin already noted how comparably wasteful usually so careful managing wild animals can be in regards to ants. Ants rarely ever have to experience hunger or lack of anything. If the colony needs something, they'll take it. There won't be a situation where something necessary is missing, because long before this comes to that they'll move elsewhere. This goes to a point where even when we humans spend an afternoon paving over ant hills and putting concrete on top that they just evacuate and move into the resulting building if need be. Ants are fiercely efficient and effective, but they don't care about how much they take from their surroundings, we have that much in common with them it seems. This goes to a point where in one colony AntsCanada presented on YouTube the ants simply assumed that water was an infinite resource and they started dumping their trash and corpses into the artificial river the guy had constructed. Obviously, it's not infinite and water can turn into a scarce resource in a formicarium of less than a meter in length, resulting in them poisoning their own water with their waste due to the limited resources AC as an ant keeper can provide inside of a closed system. Obviously that's a dramatic scenario, but a nice one to illustrate how they work. If they had to - biologically they're incapable as they don't need much - ants would plunder the resources of a given terrain and move on once it's only dust. You could probably say that about a lot of animals of course, but the society ants construct are especially vulnerable to this kind of overexploitation in nature. The only thing that is stopping them is nature itself, evolution, biological factors, their inherent competition with other ants and their size paired with the size of the world they live in. ninjewtsu posted:Are there any interactions between ants and bees or wasps or termites? Or do they just occasionally war with each other same as they would vs any other animal There are some coincidences where ants invade a bee hive and in those cases the bees, or at least the brood they couldn't save, usually are doomed. Wasps are a different thing as they eat insects and hunt for meat all day long, so ants are a possible prey. Snatching a single ant is easy food from air, but ants even developed strategies against wasps by positioning guards on top of high objects that can jump onto hunting wasps, the entire subfamily Formicinae can spray venom over quote a distance and they are very able to use that as anti-air weaponry, plus, again, ants outnumber them easily. Sometimes though ants and wasps ally up when hunting and ants go for flying prey that once in the air will be tackled by the wasps, the parts of them that fall down will be looted by the ants. Same goes for every wasp that falls, though, it's a risky business. Ants and termites though, that's a different story. Ants exist all over the world, on every continent but Antarctica (as far as we know...) and assuming a given ant colony covers a surface area of X via foraging, it is estimated that around 60 to 70% of land surface on earth is populated by ants. There only is one exception: The rain forests. There termites hold their ground fiercely for hundreds of millions of years already and they show no sign of giving up their reign. Usually the ground there is either covered by ants or by termites, that's not an exaggeration, there rarely is ever spot in any rain forest on earth that's not part of some territory. Usually it's a 60 to 40 split in favor of the termites, both species have co-evolved over millions of years to fight against the other. Tropical worker ants by a vast majority, estimated 70 to 90%, don't die while hunting or to diseases or whatever, but due to dying either by termites or by another ant. The termites fight among each other and so do the ants and they all fight literally endless wars against each other. Ant species in those areas are usually very polygynious to be able to keep up with the massive amount of eggs a termite queen can lay (up to 50 000 per day) and they often form enormous supercolonies to be able to stand a chance. The wars against termites take months or years and once over on one front, they keep fighting on another just a few meters further away. They have done this for around 200 million years now and show no intention to ever stop until either the family of ants or the order of termites (which are as noted before not at all related to each other in any way) have won. Well, and then they'll keep on waging war against each other anyways.
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Jul 24, 2020 23:18
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Captain Monkey posted:Ants kill people pretty infrequently excepting cases of infants/the elderly that can’t escape and anaphylactic shock cases due to allergies. Yeah exactly, almost never does a human die to ants without being allergic to them or dying from something else they might carry. There are super rare tales of army ants being able to overpower injured humans in the desert and just eating them alive, but those stories are most likely just tales and not really a thing. Humans are enormous mammals, our skin is thick and we are mostly invulnerable to their venom, it would take thousands of bites and stings (spray is entirely without effect unless they aim at our eyes or inside noses etc) to even hurt us. Plus, we are in no way their typical prey, as they can't eat us. It would take days to even cut away a single finger, our blood is annoying and has no nutritional value and they'd only want the proteins of our muscles, which are deeply packed inside of the body. The math just says no here.
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Jul 24, 2020 23:22
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Goons Are Great posted:
This rules so fuckin much nature is the coolest
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Jul 24, 2020 23:31
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That reminds me, how do ants feel about eating carrion? If there is a dead bird or dog or something rotting near their nest, do they go for the meat once it is exposed? Do they go eat the maggots?
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Jul 24, 2020 23:38
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VictualSquid posted:That reminds me, how do ants feel about eating carrion? They love that! They won't hunt down humans or birds or whatever, because the cost-benefit calculation is off, but if it's dead already, well then there's dinner to enjoy! Ants will gladly eat dead mice, birds, even dogs and probably even dead humans. They cannot keep up with more specialized carrion eaters of course, but they gladly just use that for their benefit. Vultures for example love to tear apart the carrion, which opens the meat up for consumption for the ants. Inner organs, collapsed blood vessels, everything that is remotely fresh, juicy and muscular will be cut away and carried home if possible, or consumed on location as much as possible, leaving just the skin, bones and hair behind. Here's a video by AntsCanada (yeah I know...) where he offers his fire ants a dead mouse and he got some pretty sweet shots of how they go on to consume it inside out.  Dead rodent in here, also it's quite to nasty to see if you're not used to ants, so be aware before you want to watch ants tearing apart a dead mouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0civp9egQQ&t=298s I timestamped it so you can avoid the endlessly annoying blahblah and needless effects he stuffs into those videos, making them unwatchable. The shots are great though and you can really see the progress over time.
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Jul 25, 2020 00:04
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Goons Are Great posted:They love that! They won't hunt down humans or birds or whatever, because the cost-benefit calculation is off, but if it's dead already, well then there's dinner to enjoy! Ants will gladly eat dead mice, birds, even dogs and probably even dead humans. They cannot keep up with more specialized carrion eaters of course, but they gladly just use that for their benefit. Vultures for example love to tear apart the carrion, which opens the meat up for consumption for the ants. Inner organs, collapsed blood vessels, everything that is remotely fresh, juicy and muscular will be cut away and carried home if possible, or consumed on location as much as possible, leaving just the skin, bones and hair behind. If I can say one good thing about AntsCanada it's that he has a really nice camera and is good at using it.
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Jul 25, 2020 00:10
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Definitely. I just wish he wouldn't put 12 minutes of uninteresting and repeating words with dumb effects into 15 minutes of videos and sticks to the interesting stuff. I wouldn't even mind the insane clickbait he always does if he would just do those really good ant shots and detailed stories about what they do.
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Jul 25, 2020 00:14
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Goons Are Great posted:Definitely. I just wish he wouldn't put 12 minutes of uninteresting and repeating words with dumb effects into 15 minutes of videos and sticks to the interesting stuff. I wouldn't even mind the insane clickbait he always does if he would just do those really good ant shots and detailed stories about what they do. agreed agreed agreed. His videos improve a lot if you mute them, and I wish he would take longer, lingering shots instead of cutting so often. But hell, it's good footage and this mouse thing is fascinating. As for actual content: I sit on my porch a lot these days since the weather is nicer and I think my outside steps are in the path of an ant scout because I see him (him? her? ant genders how do they work) trooping across every few days. Fortunately he stays outside, as there's no food in here for him.
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Jul 25, 2020 00:17
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Heh, even if it's not part of some path, they definitely will check it out regularly. In terms of ant genders, stuff is comparably simple in how to see them. Strictly biologically speaking, worker ants are genderless, as they have no properties of any gender and no sexual activity. That would make the males, well, male and the queens female, with a ton of genderless workers in between. Anatomically speaking, all worker and queen ants are female, as they have ovaries and are lacking male genitals (in fact, the venom stinger and sprayer are just hosed up ovaries). So calling them girls is just as fine as sticking to a neutral word. Only male would always be wrong for a worker. Genetically it's less easy, but at least easy to understand: Females and queens have two sets of chromosomes (called diploid), which means they got one set from their mother (the queen) and one by their daddy (the male the queen mated with before making the colony, his sperm is stored in a royal sperm bank inside of the queen's body. This organ is called spermatheca and it stays alive in there for her entire life). Males, on the other hand, always are haploid, meaning they have only one set of chromosomes - those of their mother. They are lacking the second set of chromosomes entirely, they are not clones of their mother though, as there still is the regular genetic recombination happening, it's just from one instead of two sources. This is possible via a process called parthenogenesis, in nature a very common way to reproduce, where one individual copies its own genetic code and induces a fake pregnancy using that code in a non-fertilized egg. The queen can simply close a valve inside her body to not let her new egg get in contact with the stored sperm, to keep it unfertilized. This setup is called Haplodiploidy and is the result of the lack of allosomes in ants. That means unlike us humans, they do not have an X/Y separation, but no genetic component of their sex at all. It is merely a result of one gene being represented once, or twice in the individual. Basically, there is one gene that says "This ant is male", but this gene is not functional if it's existing twice in the ant - meaning if it's on two sets of chromosomes. If this is the case, however, this gene stays inactive and the resulting individual will grow to the - genetically speaking "normal anatomy" - female phenotype with female properties, like ovaries. Everything else, like caste, is determined afterwards. edit: Editor's note, I am strictly speaking of the genetic basis of ant colonies and the biological fascination of haplodiploidy for some eusocial animals, not making any comment towards gender roles in humans. Also, I am simplifying here, of course, as soon as we go into genes stuff turns funky and is always part of ongoing research. Goons Are Gifts fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jul 25, 2020 |
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Jul 25, 2020 00:31
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When you talk about "wars" between termites and ants, could you clarify a bit? Is this just hunting and defense, or will ants seek out and kill termites they have no intention of ever eating? That feels kind of weird to me if it's the case, because all termites are vegetarian and many ant species are exclusively or primarily carnivores. Depending on the ant species there seem to be many combinations of ant/termite pairs that just are not even going after the same resources. I'm astonished there aren't species pairs that have evolved a truce or even symbiosis
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Jul 25, 2020 02:14
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cheetah7071 posted:When you talk about "wars" between termites and ants, could you clarify a bit? Is this just hunting and defense, or will ants seek out and kill termites they have no intention of ever eating? Excellent question! Also one that drove Darwin and many Myrmecologists into frustration, as it seems to make no sense. That goes for ant wars in general - for example, why would wood ants engage in a war against harvester ants, or even leafcutters? Wood ants eat insects, like aphids and eat sweet stuff, harvester ants collect seeds to make bread almost exclusively and leafcutter ants just take the one thing all other ants cannot even eat - plants. Yet, it happens and it is often devastating for every participant, with massive amount of losses on both sides for no apparent reason. Against termites it's even weirder, given that it's true, there are termites that don't eat wood (but soil, or grass) but they never eat insects and don't really compete with ants at all. First of all, ants engaging in war never hunt them for food, just as little as one pack of wolves isn't going after the lone wolf trespassing in order to eat him. When an ant scout stumbles upon another ant - or termite - nest, they don't start raiding it, looking for easy targets and bring back some corpses for consumption, but they lay out a trail of pheromones and at home spread a "war" chemical, that rallies up ants. The scout then recruits them and leads them to the target nest, then they engage in fighting, specifically to invade and enter the nest, kill the brood and queen(s) and remove the ant nest from existence entirely. Many species will, of course, carry home corpses to eat them, but this is not a result from hunting them, it's an attempt to cut losses. The lose-gain calculation is terribly off in those wars, usually each colony loses a majority of their workers due to the fighting. There are three reasons for this behavior in general and why they would even bother to wage war against a species that doesn't really compete with them: First off, territory. It's just that. Both ants and termites are effective and efficient in using it and they will do everything in their power to get what they want, as they consider everything the sun touches as their land. Whether or not they bother each other while doing so, doesn't really matter, both groups of animals consider the things in and around the nest as their own and will defend it against everything, no matter the risk, cost or benefit. That's why ants will without any hesitation bite and sting any human hand that touches their nest, even though they have no hope in ever killing or even really hurting you. They spray venom on cows and crawl below a bird's feather to do a single bite if one lands nearby, as that's how they are. Both ants and termites are extremely aggressive towards their territory and will not allow any trespasser in there, no matter what it is. Termites tend to be more tolerant in this regard than ants, and it's a fair assumption if you believe that ants are probably the aggressors in beginning ant-termite wars, though. The second reason is the lack of will to survive in each individual of a colony, which is a defining feature for all eusocial animals and one that seems to make the least sense in the theory of evolution. Ant workers have no apparent desire to stay alive when defending their colony, not even when hunting. They will, of course, run away when scared, as it's more effective to run away against a foe you cannot defeat, but as soon as stuff turns too dangerous for the colony, they will gladly jump onto anything and sacrifice their lives just to do one single bite if there is a single shred of hope that this action will scare the invader off. Bees, as is well known, even go to the length of literally sacrificing them by stinging mammals, even though their stinger is equipped with a barb, which in flexible mammal skin causes the bee to injure itself deadly (something, by the way, bees do not have to suffer from when killing insects with it, there the barb is very useful for extra damage to the victim with no risk to the bee itself). If all participants on both sides of a war are willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause with no interest in truce or peaceful co-existence, the resulting war will inevitably be merciless. The last reason and also the origin of the first and second reason is their reproduction. Both ants and termites have nuptial flights, they produce male and female individuals with wings that then fly out, leave the nest forever and mate elsewhere before founding a new colony. They have no interaction with where they came from afterwards. This mean that there simply is no evolutionary pressure in developing strategies that end a war, assess the usefulness of it or especially not any pressure towards changing the attitude a single worker or soldier ant or termite has towards their own life. The life of a single ant or termite is not depending on their own at all - they are entirely unable to exist without their colony - it's the health of the entire colony that matters and it's the only thing that matters. If a monogynious ant queen dies, this is the end for the colony in various ways, but especially in their ability to reproduce and preserve and enhance their genes. The same goes for the colony dying out due to invaders. If there is no incentive for the individual to stay alive and if the only evolutionary pressure lies on the colony itself, this inevitably leads to a change of focus. Ants and termites don't engage in war because they need to or because it's useful to the single ants, but it's useful for the colony. A nearby nest destroyed means more space to conquer and build nests in and, more importantly, less potential threat to the colony. They cannot trust each other - they can't even communicate with each other in any meaningful way - so it's safer for the colony to assume they're hostile and must be destroyed. That said, almost all ants are hunters to some degree and hunt insects, so termites are also potential prey and will definitely not be spared, so it's not rare that the initial aggression was the result of hunting activity. A special case pictured in this video, for example, it's different, as it's army ants invading a termite nest. This truly does not make any sense - even from the ant perspective - as army ants do not have a nest and do not fight for territory, but are nomads that attack and process everything in their path. As such, the resulting battle is less than a war, but an oversized hunting party, check it out, there's a mean cliffhanger in the end for some reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZEGWWkpbX8 edit: actually here is the second part of that video to avoid that cliffhanger. Jesus BBC, why do you have to be like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8vFFM_k1FI Goons Are Gifts fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Jul 25, 2020 |
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Jul 25, 2020 09:57
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I got hooked into watching ant videos once again, if you're interested, here are some really nice ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu0HN9rYtIw Really nice list of amazing scenes from incredible documentaries by BBC. The shots they get regularly inside the nest using tiny robots and insane digging techniques as well as awesome filming tricks are absolutely stunning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSYpWaFsIRY A fun short one by BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO3yKYC305g A full documentary by national geographic about army ants, I referenced several videos from that ITT already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqECNYmM23A Who could have thought I would ever link a kurzgesagt video? It's about the Argentine ant and their global colony I talked about earlier, also very nicely animated. It also talks about the topic of resource efficiency and how wasteful ants can be, resulting in massive disruption of entire ecosystems due to the ants putting too much pressure on their prey and even their predators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PljzqcsQ62U Rather bad quality, but a nice insight for termite vs ant wars by National Geographic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC4MjPKf3jY A admittedly dramatic but nice video about slaver ants stealing babies by Deep Look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er-OnJCn1gg You remember the underwater ants we talked about earlier? Yeah, those (not the entirely specialized ones though), great pictures and even greater voice by David Attenborough who even dubs ants talking to each other at BBC. Feel free to post more!
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Jul 25, 2020 12:23
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You've mentioned making bread a few times, how do harvester ants go about doing that?
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Jul 27, 2020 18:27
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Carillon posted:You've mentioned making bread a few times, how do harvester ants go about doing that? Ah yes, I have a big post about it here, but the short version is this: Some ant species, called harvester ants, which are the genera Messor, Pheidole and Pogonomyrmex don't do the regular sweet stuff/insect business, but instead bake some actual bread, called simply ant bread. They do this because it solves two problems at once, being the potential lack of feeding insects and honeydew or other sources of energy, and the problem of storing food. Those ants wander around and look for seeds to collect and harvest them, the kind of seeds doesn't matter too much, they accept wheat as well as flower seeds. They take those seeds, carry them to their nest, remove the skin if it has any and sort them based on what plants they come from. Then they store them in fortified underground granaries, which never go below or above a certain point of temperature due to the way it's constructed as well as the ants bringing in heat from the sun (hot rocks etc) or cool water from outside. The seeds get licked by specific granary worker ants which prevents the seed from germinating even if the condition would be good for them to keep them fresh for months or even years,throughout monsoon as well as drought. Then there are specific baker ants, which have enlarged mandibles and a special set of mouth parts, with which they can take the seeds and crush them, moving them into their mouths and mixing the resulting flour with saliva. Then they chew on this dough for many hours, filling it with enzymes that open up the proteins and carbohydrates, vitamins etc. in the dough. Once done they put it together into gray or white balls that get shared around the colony to feed them, that's the ant bread. Species who do this usually eat almost or entirely nothing else but that, it's really cool. They also often lose a certain procentage of seeds along the way, which helps plants to grow elsewhere. Similar to how squirrels spread plants, but in a much bigger scale but a smaller area.
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Jul 27, 2020 19:20
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Goons Are Great posted:Ah yes, I have a big post about it here, but the short version is this:  
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Jul 27, 2020 20:50
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Oh poo poo those are the big red ants that I grew up with! Love those guys. Since they’re native to Texas, would they be relatively easy to keep?
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Jul 28, 2020 01:56
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Harvester ants in general are relatively easy to keep, yes! They often aren't considered prime beginner ants but "medium difficulty" for ant keepers, as their lifestyle and general behavior can be a bit challenging to the keeper and they need a rather big enclosure due to their size. However, it's far from impossible and I considered expanding my ant empire with a harvester queen, too! Typically they are less aggressive than most other ants and mostly focused on their seed collecting business. Especially in the beginning when the colony is small, it might be weeks during which you can't see them at all (although that's often the case for all ants), as once their granaries are filled up, they stay in the nest and mind their business, their reproduction cycle is around the standard length, so it takes around 2 months for babies to grow up into adults, which for beginners often isn't so exciting. As most species grow around 10 to 15mm big per worker, you also need a sizeable formicarium, at best an actual terrarium with at least ~50cm in length and a lot of soil so they can dig a lot, as that's their main business. A good setup would be, say, a 50x30x30cm terrarium, halfway filled with 10 to 15cm of soil. Even bigger is always welcome, of course. An alternative would be a specific formicarium with various segments, for example a concrete nest of proper size, connected to a few smaller tanks via plastic tubes. That kind of setup I have for myself, too, just on a smaller scale as my ants are much smaller. Both setups can be a bit expensive in the beginning (probably around 100-150 bucks? Depends where you get it or if you build stuff yourself, which often is a very good possibility for ant keepers) and in the terrarium variant you have the problem that you can't properly monitor the nest, so you don't know what's up. That's why those species are considered medium, rather than beginner's ants. Once settled though, the maintenance is close to zero, if the setup's good you need neither lighting nor ventilation or any kind of humidity control, the seeds cost basically nothing (just buy a kilo of seed mix and be done with it for, like, a year) and you can use almost any kinds of those, you usually don't have to worry about feeder insects at all (they probably take a fly or something that accidentally flies in and that's enough) and they're very clean, so you only have to empty their junkyard every few weeks. As with all native species, you can of course release them back into the wild without trouble if you realize it's not right for you or if stuff goes super sideways for some reason.
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Jul 28, 2020 10:32
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Check out ol wiener butt here: https://twitter.com/Myrmecos/status/1288638926849179655
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Jul 30, 2020 02:51
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aphid_licker posted:Check out ol wiener butt here: how long till this species' queens look like termite queens
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Jul 30, 2020 02:56
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That's a special army ant thing. Due to their lifestyle swapping between nomadic and settlement phases and the lack of nests, the queen has to produce eggs in record time. She does that for a few weeks, then they enter nomadic phase and carry them around while raiding, which is how we usually know army ants, until the eggs hatch into larvae, then the intense raiding starts to feed them, then when they pupate and no longer need any food, they settle temporarily again and the queen goes back to egg laying. That one is a hybrid, the most specialized army ant species have developed metamorphosis for the queen, where she swaps between looking like that during settlement phase and goes back to look more like an ant during nomadic phase, swapping back and forth every few weeks. Due to the lifestyle she has to stay mobile and this is not really possible when looking like this, so they probably won't ever go full termite style, as termite queens lose the ability to move a few months after founding a new nest.
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Jul 30, 2020 08:51
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Kind of a long shot, but does someone off the top of their head know of an ant species that is relatively easy to keep, does not have to overwinter (I do not have a temp controlled area that I can cool down in my place) and does a lot of above-ground landscaping / gardening / building? I'm envisioning having this big terrarium where they build bridges or do that neat thing where they build spires around plant stems etc.
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Aug 1, 2020 16:24
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Saw some pavement ants outside, so I gave them a bit of dog treat
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Aug 1, 2020 16:47
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The Slack Lagoon posted:Saw some pavement ants outside, so I gave them a bit of dog treat  aphid_licker posted:Kind of a long shot, but does someone off the top of their head know of an ant species that is relatively easy to keep, does not have to overwinter (I do not have a temp controlled area that I can cool down in my place) and does a lot of above-ground landscaping / gardening / building? I'm envisioning having this big terrarium where they build bridges or do that neat thing where they build spires around plant stems etc. I'd know a few, but the combinations are rather complicated. How do you define easy to keep for yourself? Are you cool with humidity and temperature control, lighting etc in an appropriate setup? How big do you imagine the terrarium to be? In general note that hibernation is not a hard thing for an ant keeper to do. It's literally zero effort, only the one or two weeks you need to prepare them before and after the sleep are special, the sleep itself is no effort at all. A cool place is also easy - if outside/basement/garage/balcony or similar things aren't an option, you can take a fridge without a problem! I do that myself very successfully, no casualties at all and super easy to control, as I can raise the temperature in the beginning and end (without losing the food in it, it's my regular fridge) to minimize preparation time and then it can just stay at regular fridge temperature for months. Non-hibernating usually means somewhat exotic and more demanding in their enclosure and resources, unless, like, you already live in appropriate areas. They also are notoriously harder to keep as they often have a very fast reproduction cycle, which means your setup has be to be appropriate. Not an impossible task though, most tropical ants (actually most ants in general) build a ton of stuff above ground and design their surroundings actively. Just today I had to remove walls my ants have built around their graveyard, as I had to remove the corpses to avoid fungus growth. They also build a bridge between their nest and their current outworld, as well as two satellite nests that they are now working on combining to one big one. There's lots of exciting stuff ants do, even for comparably "easy" and typical ant species.
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Aug 1, 2020 17:18
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Those are good questions, thank you, that helps me think about the problem. I'm willing to try a larger setup, but it seems rear end-backwards to do something like that as babby's first colony. I would definitely be willing to do some temperature / moisture control. I share an apartment with a bunch of guys so it's all bedrooms and there's no unheated room is basically the problem, and the fridge is pretty full already. I'll hunt through the building for a place that's a bit protected from the elements, what you write makes me suspect that I way overestimated how hard the overwintering is. So just lasius niger? I kinda like how yellow ants look though. I'll think the issue over along the lines of the questions you asked, thank you again.
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Aug 1, 2020 18:06
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Lasius Niger or just Lasius in general is *the* beginner ant species. They're super common all over the world except in rain forest and deserts, they're extremely easy and practically free to keep (you can literally build excellent formicariums for them out of old plastic bottles), you don't need any lighting or humidity control as long as your regular atmosphere circles around 40 to 70% humidity and between 12 to 35°C in the room they're in and they are regularly productive, meaning around 2 months per ant from egg to adult, which gives plenty of time to adjust the setup at any point. Workers grow 3 to 4mm big and queens around twice that, so they fit in almost everywhere. Additionally, they are very curious and very aggressive, meaning you get to see them comparably quickly and often once they're out of the protective phase of colony development, are satisfied with nothing but honey, honeywater or sugar water and around once a week a batch of proteins (anything goes from fresh insects over frozen ones (except dried and freeze-dried) to dog or cat food or even chocolate). They are also very clean as they construct specific graveyards and junkyards within a certain distance to the nest, so you can clean them very easily and without disturbing them and they belong to the subfamily Formicinae, which means no stinger but a spraying device plus formic acid mixed with venom, which makes them safe for humans even if you are allergic to ants, as they cannot pierce through your skin. To make them perfect beginner ants, they also cannot chew through wood, gypsum or concrete, which opens up almost any professional and DIY nest setup, while being active diggers and constructors, so you can observe them in their natural urge to dig and build things. Also, almost all Lasius species are aphidophile, which means they love aphids and will actively herd and breed them if given the chance. Colonies are monogynious and claustral, which makes the setup phase a cakewalk, too. All of these properties define them as easy to keep, simply because it's low to zero effort to do so. If you take care of them for 10 minutes every week or two, given the right setup, they will thrive and grow brilliantly. Of course there are many, many more species similarly great and if you're looking for something special or more exotic - having ants that bake ant bread are not really harder to keep either, if you're willing to spend some money in the setup. Wood ants construct a lot of stuff, including their usual ant hill, however they can grow very large and getting them can be tough, as keeping many of those species is often illegal depending on the country, as they are endangered. Basically you have to ask yourself what your focus of ant keeping shall be - what effort are you willing to put in, in what time frames? What's the money situation like? Are energy costs a thing? Some setups can get expensive when you have to maintain 50% higher humidity than usual 24/7. What do you want to see from the ants - are you okay with low or almost zero activity over weeks from to time, or do you prefer action? Any specific property you'd love to see, like ant baking, ant farming, ant herding, special constructions or even parasitism? You can achieve all of those given the right setup and offer the ants a happy and exciting life. A last point is the age. Monogynious species have a hard expiration date - the queen's life. It can take up to three decades (for lasius at least) but it will end at some point - polygynious species you can make essentially immortal and there are ant keepers who do it over generations and inherit them to their kids. This also leads to the question of dedication. If you happen to move a lot or not be at home for weeks due to business, a effortful and resource consuming species may not be the right one for you, even less if you have to move and you have to figure out transportation for an expensive and bulky setup that you at best move with minimum disturbance for the ants. Local species you can just release into the wild at any time and be done with it if necessary, but non-native ones shouldn't and often mustn't be released like that, so you then would have to find a new keeper. Just a few more questions for you to ask yourself before making a decision. In any case, ant keeping is almost always comparable to keeping, say, common reptiles in terms of costs and effort. So as pets they usually are rather easy and cheap to keep, plus they're a ton of fun and very fascinating, although of course nothing you'll cuddle with.
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Aug 1, 2020 18:38
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The dog food thing is excellent info, thank you. I had been looking at seed-eating ants because the mental image of feeding insects to my guys all the time was kind of a turnoff, but getting a little wet cat food or something occasionally is fine so lasius niger seems like the one. The plastic bottle thing sounds amazing. How does moisture control work in that setup, I just assume that regular inhabited room moisture outside the heating period will be okay for them, or do I sort of chain up the bottles and put a sort of water feature in at one end and let them gravitate to where in the chain the moisture works for them? Do I poke air holes into the bottles?
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Aug 1, 2020 19:48
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In general Lasius likes it humid in their nest, they can tolerate it to any degree even if it's literally wet and dripping water, as long as they can control the amount and don't drown. 80 to 99% is just fine - my nest currently is moving between 85 and 95%, not because they need this, but because they like it that way. When I had it to a more reasonable 75% they refused to move in, so I assume it had something to do with that. I would highly recommend you a test tube setup to begin! If you buy a queen rather than collect one yourself, you will get her and her babies along with a specific test tube setup in which they can stay for a long time - up to a year! Else you can also just buy a whole package of test tubes from a pharmacy or order them online or many stores that also have some basic chemicals around. In fact, if you happen to be in Germany or around Central Europe, I can even mail you a queen in a test tube, as I got three queens around from the last nuptial flight! Mailing living ants is a bit stressful, but in my experience it works out fine if it's fast enough, the weather is appropriate and there's no major bad luck involved. Alternatively, I can also recommend you a store or two to buy setups as well as ants for as low as 3 bucks per colony. A test tube setup always looks the same: you fill the lower 40% with water, then put cotton wool on the edge of the water, so that it soaks it up, leading to around a fifth of the tube being a water tank separated from the rest via wet cotton wool. The rest you leave empty, that's where the colony can live in. Actually I have some pictures around from when I made a bunch of these for last nuptial flight:  Water in  Make a water tank out of it  Red foil around it to make it appear dark for ants - done! I then placed the new queen in:  Sealed the entrance with some more cotton wool and that's it. All of my queens - and all queens I worked with so far - accepted this as a nice founding tube and started laying eggs. My current colony started exactly like that, lived in their starting tube for a full year before the water tank was depleted and I simply made a new test tube setup which they accepted after just a week and moved into. In that second test tube they stayed until a few weeks ago (another full year) they moved into a new concrete nest I built for them. They started with just the queen and moved out of the test tubes with I assume - I can only guess by now - more than 150 workers. This test tube I placed in a miniature terrarium, being at 10x5x5cm in total. There is some sand in there as ground floor, along with a drinking trough, a small carved rock with a sponge and some more water, a honey trough and a occasionally filled miniature bowl for insects - that's it, that was my entire original setup in which this colony lived for more than two years now. I would share a picture but I couldn't find one on my phone and am not at home right now, but I'll post my full setup later! You can buy a small terrarium like that at a specific ant shop, which I did, but you can also build it yourself or get a regular small terrarium at any reptile shop or whatever goes. Technically you can also just use a plastic box, just make sure that you find a good lid that let's air in but doesn't let the ants out. In general I recommend a specific ant store for these things, because it's super duper easy to get stuff there, it's rarely too expensive (or course it's a specific niche store so it has other prices than walmart stuff) and it's always perfect for ants and the keeper. If not, anything else goes, too! All ant setup, called formicarium, have to consist out of two parts: The nest and the Arena, or out world. You can have a nest inside the arena, you can also have it separately and connected via tubes. A single terrarium with no other stuff inside is basically both at the same time, which works just as fine - in that sense you can as well place the test tube into a terrarium filled with soil and are good to go. The rule is: Nest >>>> Arena. For Arena you can take anything - a plastic box, a wooden bowl, a bottle, doesn't matter. The arena serves the purpose to simulate the regular world for the ants. This is where they should be fed - not the nest! -, where they find water, where they dump their garbage (often at least, some species construct garbage chambers in their nests, which is fair game), where, for them, danger is waiting for them. This is also the only place they should encounter you and your tools, the nest is sacred and shall not be touched by you if possible. I can later give you some links for both professional and big setups as well as really easy and even creative and free ones. Ant keepers really show creativity when it comes to how the ants live, but as long as the species is happy with what you provide, anything works.
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Aug 1, 2020 21:25
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I'm in Germany too! I'm thinking about getting these guys: https://www.antstore.net/shop/de/Ameisen/Ameisen-aus-Mitteleuropa/Lasius-niger-Schwarze-Wegameise.html For nine Euros I get the queen and 11-25 workers, that seems like a pretty good deal to basically have a little colony that can do a little stuff immediately. Then I'd skip the test tube stage probably. I'll build the entire setup first ofc, and post pics before I dump some poor guys into there. I'll google those bottle-based setups, or if you have a link to one that you could post that would be awesome. Would lasius niger tend to eat pillbugs? I kinda wanna add some of those because they like moisture too and I think they're pretty cute, and they might be useful as detritivores? Obviously in a setup that is large enough that they can avoid one another a bit. On my balcony they seemed to be fine with coexisting.
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Aug 2, 2020 00:27
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aphid_licker posted:I'm in Germany too! I'm thinking about getting these guys: https://www.antstore.net/shop/de/Ameisen/Ameisen-aus-Mitteleuropa/Lasius-niger-Schwarze-Wegameise.html Ahh, Antstore would be exactly my recommendation by the way, been customer there for years, great guys and great products. I'd highly recommend getting some tools from there, ant specific tweezers for example they have there for a few bucks, as well as the soil as it's perfect for them. I bought a whole collection of stuff from them, all without any problems. So yeah, those 11-25 worker colonies are excellent for starters! It gives the queen enough to to always be fine and you also get to see a lot of ants quite early on. This specific colony is probably now in their first year, meaning the queen you'd buy got pregnant around this time in 2019. That also means they already made it through winter and all the nasty stuff the first year can yield, so you're looking at a perfect starter colony that is most likely going to be very successful from the very beginning. For your DIY purposes, I'd recommend to check out Antstore's setups to be inspired how they structure it and everything. The nest is probably going to be the test tube for quite a while nevertheless, 11-25 is not a colony size that warrants moving out of there and Lasius Niger specifically are very loyal to a once chosen spot. Note that you must never urge them to move, neither violently via shaking them out or something, nor indirectly by opening the nest up or remove the foil etc. as this can cause major damage, massive stress in emergency evacuations and the entire brood, sometimes even several workers being killed in the struggle. This is especially true for nest loyal species, like those guys. Still not at home, I'm nerdy phone posting today while melting in the night's heat, but I'll post some setups later! Pillbugs in general are fine, but I wouldn't recommend it in the beginning and especially not until they found a nice place to be after the test tube got stinky. Not because they'd wage war, they wouldn't, but because making the Pillbugs happy requires you to keep the arena moist and humid. This of course opens up the possibility to plant some nice plants and also, I can recommend it in longterm, getting some springtails in there, as they, too, eat the ants garbage and won't hurt them. The reason you shouldn't do it for a while is that if you put too much soil into the terrarium and make it wet, the ants will move in there and make their nest in places you might not like, especially in the beginning. While it sounds nice to leave the annoying test tube asap, it takes away your ability to monitor them properly and see what's up. I'd only recommend setting up such an outworld after they moved to a permanent nest that you have chosen (and probably built) for them, where they are happy and thus won't move randomly. It's a common beginner's mistake to make too many spots in the outworld, as dumb as it sounds, livable. I started like this, too making a big and nice arena with plants and springtails and even one or two beetles, but I quickly ran into problems I couldn't control like the soil molding massively. If the ants would have been there then, they'd get poisoned by the fungi and I couldn't remove it without destroying the nest, which would have been terrible - in fact, most queens don't survive this kind of stress. For the first few months at least, I'd recommend a simple outworld with not more than 1 or 2mm of dry soil and separated water tanks, no (real) plants and no other inhabitants. This is especially important because living plants and other insects can carry parasites, especially if they come from outside, and small colonies often die due to that. Later on, when they are settled and bigger and healthy, some friends and also plants work out fine.
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Aug 2, 2020 01:26
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Omigosh I went to move a tomato pot today and underneath was like a hundred ants with queen and eggs  I put the pot down carefully, I'm assuming they are living in the dirt inside the pot, maybe they used the hollow underneath it as a large like, prebuilt chamber? I dunno but I'll check tomorrow to make sure they're ok. Been having bad ant luck this summer
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Aug 2, 2020 01:34
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