|
Thank you, as always! Got an email that my mosses should be in the mail now 
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2020 21:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 16, 2024 06:04 |
|
|
Just as a final note, if you keep them along with living plants, you have to make sure they find enough decomposing stuff of any kind, else they'll get hungry and start eating living plants, too. For the same reason one has to feed them, too, (any kind of vegetable, fruit, plant, even stuff you partially ate, doesn't matter, they take everything) when keeping them along with ants, as else they might figure out that larvae and pupae are very tasty protein snacks. If the enclosure or colony is big enough to produce a steady flow of trash, that's not a problem though, as dying plant parts get formed into humus by them, which then leads to more plants, meaning more plant parts etc. Many springtails procreate via pathogenesis without sex, so they can get extremely numerous very fast given enough food.
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2020 21:59
|
|
|
Yeah I used a shitload of rotten wood and leaves for landscaping and tried putting in a vegetable scrap to see if they bite. How does it work, if I don't give them food they starve and eat my plants, so aren't I locked into a spiral of keeping them fed which makes them procreate which gets me deeper into the hole? Do I have to throw in some kind of predator to control things?
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2020 23:24
|
|
|
Nah, you just have to keep a certain balance. If they take over, you can easily just lure them on an old cucumber or something (mine LOVE cucumbers for some reason, and they mold rather slowly) and throw them out to make some room. They will not eat living stuff unless they are really starving and they will first start eating each other's eggs things like that before going onto the plants, so it only becomes a problem if you cannot keep the balance by overfeeding or causing too many to starve too quickly. I'd recommend having a week or two of good observation on what they like, where they move and how they react to disturbances, so that you can figure out how to keep a healthy balance of death, decay and new babies showing up, so that you neither get an enclosure covered in jumping white dots, nor one with no springtails. The boxes you usually buy them in tend to be VERY full of animals with next to no food anymore, as they only get a bunch of yeast thrown in along with soil and then stacked in stores before sold weeks later, so it's best to not throw in all of them into your enclosure at once to avoid overrunning a not yet stable mini ecosystem with masses of decomposers. Put in a good bunch of them on day one, throw some food or whatever into the thing they come with to add them later, or release the rest into freedom (you can do that without any problem, they regulate themselves very well in nature and are one of the first things to be eaten by slightly bigger predators, as they are on the beginning of the chain). Breeding them is usually extremely easy, so less is sometimes more. However, don't be scared of me saying that they could eat living plants, I have my spring tails in various enclosures for at least four years now, sometimes even in criminally neglected systems that got overrun by mold, and they never touched anything living and survived literally everything fine. Even when I was gone for a while and didn't water it properly before while forgetting about preparing them for it, I came back to a barren wasteland, but they survived just fine on a small patch of moss that stayed moist, procreated happily once I fixed stuff and they were back to thousands of spring tails in the matter of a month. You basically breed them on accident, really, and they never cause any problems unless you really, really screwed something up. edit: Ants sometimes breed them, too, by the way! Especially in tropical regions where there are thousands and thousands of different species around (the order Collembola is made up of more than 9000 species by now, with hundreds new ones getting discovered every year), the brood chamber of ants can host a lot of tiny spring tails. Those ants usually are way bigger than them (~8mm and more for workers) and keep them there to eat up the trash the larvae produce while eating dried up stuff the ants themselves can no longer process. In order to avoid provoking the spring tails into eating the larvae, they even figured out to bring them trash. In those setups we sometimes find ants stacking their larvae next to the ant junkyard, which would be very unusual on its own, but this way the ants can just carry the larva junk a few inches further away, instead of having to carry it outside the nest. It's a very efficient symbiosis. Goons Are Gifts fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Sep 15, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 02:07
|
|
|
I had ordered springtails to try to start prepping a terrarium for my ants down the line but canadapost lost my order. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 02:32
|
|
|
Aw.  As mentioned before, after trying to make it work for years, I by now rather don't have them around in my ant setups, just because they require it moist and to stay balanced, which can be challenging. They're beautiful friends to have around, it's super fascinating how they can make even a fully closed miniature eco system work, but there are just so many variables that can cause problems. My setups were just never meant to work in humid conditions, I guess.
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 09:16
|
|
|
Seeing how much can go wrong with keeping something like this stable really makes you think about the various systems in nature, how they interact and balance and how much can go wrong.
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 14:36
|
|
|
It is absolutely incredible and I cannot understand people who don't see the delicate balance inside a fragile ecosystem given that you can reproduce a way smaller one easily. These things we make here are small, they have a very low number of variables and we can comparably easy influence it, yet keeping a healthy balance is tough. Imagine how stuff turns around when humans come around, tear down a forest and place a factory there and what that does to this balance. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 14:57
|
|
|
Yeah it was also kind of hilarious to watch Mikey at Ants Canada go through several videos of: "I added x to the system and y started dying, so I had to add z." Where he's like introducing different kinds of fish or prawns or plants or in some cases carnivorous frogs and plants trying to balance his different vivariums. A recent one is him trying to make a automatic feeder system work where cockroaches would drop into the ant outworld but that hasn't worked yet. My plan would probably be to make a sort of sprinkler system to automatically keep things moist once a day or so. MY PHARAOH QUEEN IS LAYING EGGS! PRAISE THE SUN!
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 16:02
|
|
|
The carnivore plant thing I found odd. It's not like you have to start killing your ants to keep a balance, you just have to adjust the setup accordingly. It's not like ant colonies are exponential machines that will grow ever larger endlessly. Plus the Sarracenia plant probably got over fed massively and died soon due to the food rotting in the traps. However he's in general more focused on the sensational aspect than keeping a balance, simply because the latter is boring to watch, but so is the YouTube business. Also lol that the pharaoh plan worked! Honestly I didn't have much hope for that project, it seems almost impossible to make this work, but congrats! That's amazing!
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 17:38
|
|
|
Goons Are Great posted:The carnivore plant thing I found odd. It's not like you have to start killing your ants to keep a balance, you just have to adjust the setup accordingly. It's not like ant colonies are exponential machines that will grow ever larger endlessly. Plus the Sarracenia plant probably got over fed massively and died soon due to the food rotting in the traps. My original plan failed horribly. Which was to have them move in, queen and brood into a container with mulch. I guess either the mulch wasn't to their standards of living under my toilet or the humidity wasn't right. My next plan was to leave my cricket pen in my bathroom since they were constantly raiding it to eat the crickets that died (or maybe they're killing them?) and I made a little terrarium (carbon, gravel, jungle dirt, etc) for the next batch of crickets and waited. Eventually a massive trail of like a hundred pharaoh workers formed in my bathroom next to my tub and they're just in a constant stream to/from the cricket pen. This week I noticed different little black dots and these turned out to be males (surprised they're so active) and then sometime sunday morning I happened to be up late due to D&D and say a much bigger ant among the others and I went and nabbed her. I was told they were likely to be infertile but its been a day and I notice little dots already in the test tube and most of my workers are crowding around her and tending to her so yeah success! I have them in what I hope is a really secure setup since LOL I don't want them escaping, I might get a special thing to put their setup in which I'll place in a bin with water so there's a moat and nickname it Antcatraz.
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 18:02
|
|
|
lol yeah with pharaoh ants you really want to make it secure. You'll be in a world of pain if they manage to escape and do their thing. Really exciting stuff though! I think I'd be way too scared to ever keep pharaoh ants, but they definitely are super interesting.
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 18:38
|
|
|
I'm extremely emotionally invested in the Pharaoh ant saga
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2020 22:35
|
|
|
I got pics. Her eggs in the middle.  She's hiding so hard to get a good picture among all the workers I also captured for her.  I'm preparing a new outworld with higher walls to make escapes less likely but my fluon based on my early tests (taking a bunch of workers from the trail and yeeting them into the container with the fluon applied) seems to suggest they can escape. I'll try tomorrow in case its merely an issue of the fluon not having enough time to dry or something and then switch to baby powder+alcohol.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2020 00:51
|
|
|
I had good success with parrafin oil. The ants see it and check it out, but then don't bother trying to walk on it as they would immediately fall down. When I first applied it, I saw ants crawling next to the line of oil trying to get on it, but they never even touched it as they didn't find a dry spot and then left it alone. One just has to be careful with how much to use, as they could get stuck in it, so it has to spread out well over the applied surface, but not a single escape. Works exceptionally well for small ants who usually rely on being able to walk on liquid. Might work for you, too!
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2020 09:41
|
|
|
How long is the longest ants will usually be away from the nest for when exploring/foraging?
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2020 11:36
|
|
|
Highly depends on the species and the environment. Ants are generally loyal to their current nest and will use it as a base of operations and slowly but steadily explore their surroundings. The more this exploration goes (meaning the more pheromone tracks they can lay out and replenish over time), the bigger their radius of operation will become. Some ant species are also very loyal to their nest location and will not move over many years, others move elsewhere as soon as it becomes necessary or even slightly less optimal than another spot. A general rule of thumb for a radius in which ants will forage more or less continuously is 10 to 15 meters around the nest. Smaller colonies a lot less (2 meters and below), bigger colonies a bit more (30-50 meters is the usual upper limit). The distance they may cross to search for a new home and move can be a lot bigger, sometimes ants move their nest more than 100 meters away from their original location if circumstances make it necessary - although usually they will construct temporary satellite nests on the way before starting to move. A single exploring worker will explore considerably lower distances than a pack of hunting and foraging ants. Single ants usually try to stay in spitting distance (a few meters) of the nest, where as scouting squads will travel much further. The big exception of this are of course any species of nomadic ants, especially army ants, which are entirely nomadic and swap between a settlement and a nomadic phase continuously without constructing a real nest and instead constructing so called Bivouac, nests made out of their own living ant bodies that form buildings to shelter the brood and queen. Those ants can travel more than a kilometer per day during the wandering phases and over a colony's lifetime cross entire countries and visit, raid and conquer everything from deserts to jungles.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2020 12:55
|
|
|
aphid_licker posted:
You should start a terrarium/vivarium thread! Ever since I was a kid I've had fascination with artificial biomes. I'd go down to the woods or creek, collect critters, and much of the fun was setting up the habitats. Perfect hobby for a girl with a subscription to Ranger Rick: it was like building a Barbie Dreamhouse, but with living things! To this day I still love seeing neat set-ups. And that's definitely part of the allure of this thread, since I never tried my hand at ants or the like. All y'all, please keep posting pics of your habitats!
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2020 16:24
|
|
|
I have determined that "pooter" is possibly the worst name you could give to a device useful for capturing ants, because I sure as hell can't find one on amazon, but LOTS of fart toys. I found a youtube video online and ordering parts to make one myself, I'll see how it goes. It might work out better than a piece of paper for capturing the workers on the trail. So I am suspecting that the queen(s?) only go along the trail probably at night. I've got like 4-5 people clamouring for Pharaoh queens in the ant keeping discord as it's apparently the closest thing to a legal exotic species they can keep. But just getting one took a while and I'm not looking forward to staying up past midnight. What would be ideal is if there could be some sort of ant trap that would be difficult for them to get out of that their whole trail wanders into; but they also kind of need a trail coming out of it for this to happen. At least one of those people actually runs the ant keeping store that's local to me and will possibly trade me vampire ants. Or money/store credit etc, the others are also offering money. My bathroom at this rate will never be clean. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2020 16:36
|
|
|
First attempt at a pooter was like 1 step forwards 2 steps back sort of deal. To get adequate suction the tubing needed to be kind of short, which meant being too short to conveniently use. Also the jar I used was slightly too large so getting the workers out and into a new container is also a bit of a challenge. I suspect the seal wasn't tight enough where the tubes go into the jar. I used glue, next time I'll try plastacine and hopefully I dig up a smaller jar so it's easier to tap the ants out of it or just leave it in the new container. Ideally I would know the name for a sort of stopper/plug that has a hole in it to put like a tube through.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2020 04:54
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:
I just googled "rubber stopper with hole", and looks like you can get 'em on Amazon, scientific supply places, and homebrewing stores. "One hole stopper" looks like the real name for those. Which is good to know because my bong looks an Erlynmeyer (sp?) flask and uses one, lol
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2020 17:00
|
|
|
JacquelineDempsey posted:I just googled "rubber stopper with hole", and looks like you can get 'em on Amazon, scientific supply places, and homebrewing stores. "One hole stopper" looks like the real name for those. Which is good to know because my bong looks an Erlynmeyer (sp?) flask and uses one, lol I was looking at gaskets before but holy poo poo you're right! I can even get the much more ideal two hole stopper!!!
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2020 17:39
|
|
|
Chemistry equipment and specifically industrial food equipment is often ideal for these purposes. I use flexible synthetic tubes to connect my outworlds and the nest for example, the kind that usually gets used in ice cream production for example. Very useful!
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2020 21:37
|
|
|
Looks like my ants are already preparing for winter, quite early this year. They didn't even finish their last meal and are generally slowly turning down activity. It's still quite warm around here, but if they keep this pace up I probably need to cool them down and prepare for the icy winds of winter next month. Gonna miss them dearly. To March it's gonna be a painful eternity.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2020 23:33
|
|
|
I've swapped out my outworld for my pharaoh's. Gave them a taller one. At first during my tests I thought the fluon was ineffective but maybe it just needed time to "cure"/dry or something, because afterwards a whole pile of ants couldn't seem to escape from it after a couple of days and just crowded together in a corner all sad; they've been reunited with the rest of my captive ones now, so it should only be a matter of time before other workers arrive to drag them. Currently I've decided against decorating their enclosure. I kinda want to keep a close eye on them. Goons Are Great posted:Looks like my ants are already preparing for winter, quite early this year. They didn't even finish their last meal and are generally slowly turning down activity. It's still quite warm around here, but if they keep this pace up I probably need to cool them down and prepare for the icy winds of winter next month. My own Campos have done this. I put two of them into the fridge already, going to wait a little longer on the other two because they seemed to maybe still have some developing larva.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2020 00:51
|
|
|
Going to clean my bathroom today and then switch strategies to try to collect more cleans. An empty container with either a dead cricket or a mars bar in it with a tube going in/out to somewhere where I think they're coming from. Once the bathroom is clean I won't feel pressure anymore and can take my time.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2020 19:11
|
|
|
Well, I just binge-read the whole thread. Great stuff!Goons Are Great posted:Unless if you're Australian, in which case your native ants are most likely aliens from another world, because holy drat what you Aussies got down there is beyond imagination. From the very first post, but would you care to elaborate on this? I've spent a lot of time watching meat ants (iridomyrmex purpureus) engaging in their giant ritual battles, but by the sounds of things there's a lot more going on...
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2020 12:26
|
|
|
Tree Bucket posted:Well, I just binge-read the whole thread. Great stuff! Oh, down under stuff is just crazy. In general as well as with ants, that is.  Australia hosts some of the most extraordinary ant species we've known. From weird modern ones with very specific and insane adaptation to their environment to primal ants that hardly changed at all over 150 million years. Also, it's crazily diverse. Queensland alone has more reported species that all of Europe combined. No where in the world are more ants than in Australia, including all tropical areas and rain forests. You have relatively normal looking ants:  (Camponotus consobrinus) as well as eldritch monstrosities   (Paraponera clavata)  (Myrmecia brevinoda) or straight up aliens:  I mean, like, ehhh  (both Iridomyrmex purpureus) I'm not sure anymore if these are even ants:  (the super soldier subcaste of Aenictus eugenii)  (Tetraponera allaborans) Australia is so special in terms of ants, because of its insane variety and the sheer numbers of ants around there and due to the special climate ranging from tropical to temperate. The variety of ants is only topped by the variety of ecosystems, leading to a lot of very special adaptations, or even the lack of those. Australia has species that are like a mirror of the past, with colonies that may exist for hundreds, maybe thousands of years more or less undisturbed in the vast outback, that also barely have seen any evolutionary changes. This goes to the extent where there are ant species that have not even yet developed a queen caste and civil war is common and every worker can carry out children. Parasitic ants, warmonger ants that specifically target other ant colonies, specialized wasp hunters, ant that consume birds, ants that can inject venom that can really hurt and even present a certain danger for humans, tiny ants of less than a millimeter in size or the biggest ants in the world, Australia has it all and covers all of it in between, too. Hell, we even have ocean ants that construct their nest under water, as seen ITT. Australia is the ant capital. Almost every order has at least a few species somewhere down under, sometimes far away in the outback, sometimes inside Australian houses. New species of ants are discovered constantly, almost exclusively in the tropical areas of Africa and South America, and, of course, Australia. Almost the entirety of the continent is in one way or another covered by ants, except the areas that got conquered by Termites. If you go outside and look on the ground, chances are you'll see an ant. If you don't the next colony is probably not far off anyways.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2020 15:16
|
|
|
Goons Are Great posted:
A Good Post! Interestingly I've seen these three species (or for the second one, something really similar at least) living in the same suburb in Canberra. (C. consobrinus are super cute because their forager/scouts like to operate in pairs. I. purpureus are genius engineers and carry out massive mock-battles to settle border disputes. And bull ants are scary bastards that appear to look you in the eye. Very handsome though.) Goons Are Great posted:If you go outside and look on the ground, chances are you'll see an ant. If you don't the next colony is probably not far off anyways. This is an interesting line. Is that not the case everywhere?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2020 11:31
|
|
|
Tree Bucket posted:A Good Post! Interestingly I've seen these three species (or for the second one, something really similar at least) living in the same suburb in Canberra. (C. consobrinus are super cute because their forager/scouts like to operate in pairs. I. purpureus are genius engineers and carry out massive mock-battles to settle border disputes. And bull ants are scary bastards that appear to look you in the eye. Very handsome though.) Yeah they're sexy beasts, all of them. That's not the case everywhere, no, because both the variety and the density are special in Australia. Technically, of course, the one has nothing to do with the other - you can have one dominating ant species that conquered a whole country and is everywhere, but no other species can compete with them - but since ants are so adaptable and almost always engaged in ant politics with other ant colonies nearby, co-evolution and adaptations towards or against other species are extraordinarily common. This is a special case in evolution, as only ants and termites are in a situation where another species is so similar to themselves and you don't have a few dominating species, especially for eusocial animals. Bees, for example, are entirely different. You have honey bees which are eusocial and a separate order inside the family of true bees (Apidae) and only this specific order, Apis, as well as the order of bumblebees, Bombus, is eusocial in the first place. We are talking about a variety of more than 6000 species of which only 7 species of honey bees and "only" a few of the 250 species of bumblebees are eusocial. All other bees are solitary and do not form hives at all, or only temporarily for mating and stuff like that and the seven species that aren't solitary are not really competing with each other and only became distinct species due to their geographical distance from each other. Ants, on the other hand, are an estimated 22 000 species in total, every single one of them lives in colony and is always, no exception ever, eusocial. Most of them in constant war with each other, too. Usually variety comes with density (in a linear timeline it's vice versa: Density of ant colonies in a given area will most likely result in evolution towards more distinct species, so density leads to variety) due to this dynamic they have with each other and thus, Australia is covered in ants even more so than other countries. Now, don't get me wrong, ants are common almost everywhere. Go into a European forest or patch of grass and you will most certainly find an ant somewhere - however only one, usually of one colony, or a few. In Australia, you have dozens of colonies all over the place, constantly at war with each other, constantly evolving and adapting to whatever the situation is right now and they've been doing this for the past 150 million years. So yeah, you have A LOT of ants down under and to this degree, especially going further north or further south on the globe, this is not the case. Either not at all (try finding ants in Siberia), or at least not to this degree.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2020 14:46
|
|
|
I cleaned my bathroom so now its no longer gross, and the ants after about a day or so have started coming back. So, I put a container with a mars bar with a connecting tube and we'll see if I can catch more pharaoh queens.  The spare ones I'll trade/give/sell basically since weirdly these redneck hillbilly ants are wildly popular among Canadian ant keepers.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2020 16:39
|
|
|
Suddenly there's what kinda looks like a gigantic amount of eggs in the terrarium  Don't think it's fungi or pillbug-related, it's banks of roundish little white nodules / grains about a third or half of a mm in size, placed on bits of moist wood. e: might be snails?  
aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Sep 26, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 18:52
|
|
|
That looks like snails or some sort of bugs, yeah. The size, shape and color fits to a poo poo ton of invertebrates, a but out of character would be snails if they just lay on a bit of wood, as usually snails bury them. If it's humid enough, they sometimes do it that way, too, though, so hard to say. Definitely way too big for anything smaller than the usual bugs, like your springtails or something. Did you carry in stuff from the outside? Or what's the context in how they appeared?
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 19:40
|
|
|
Yeah I put in a shitload of stuff from the outside. Leaves, rotten wood etc. Could be anything. I've never seen a snail so far, but I also haven't seen anything else big enough to produce that. Everything I got I got while it was really dry outside, so idk about the odds of randomly grabbing a snail. Biggest thing I saw so far was an earwicker.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 19:51
|
|
|
Hardly any invertebrates show parental care, usually they just lay eggs somewhere safe with the right conditions and then they'll go on their way, so there's no need for you to see anyone when it comes to eggs. Snails or bugs could as well lay the eggs there, you carry them in and they're gone for days already. My money would be on some insect, most likely a bug. They like it moist, often don't bury their eggs and just place them below a couple of leaves and stuff like that and you just brought them in on accident. I'd say just wait what comes out of it! Could be exciting, probably won't take longer than a few weeks tops before babies or larvae of some kind hatch. In general when you take stuff from outside it is very important to make sure it clean when you want to use it for any kind of terrarium based pet. Right now that hardly matters, of course, but in general it's good to clean it well with super hot or simply cooking water, else you'll infect your setup with mites, parasites and potentially hazardous bacteria or fungi in no time. Out in nature that isn't a problem as the space isn't that limited, but in a limited enclosure those can explode drastically and overrun everything in a matter of days. There's practically no stick, stone or soil outside not touched by mites in some way. I'm invested in finding out what those eggs are, though!
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 21:46
|
|
|
Yeah I don't have an expensive showpiece animal or plant in there to safeguard, or a state I'm working to preserve, so I'm okay with playing it a bit fast and loose. Definitely planned to wait and see. Ofc if dozens of snails hatch in there I'd have to kick them out before they eat everything, barren slimy wasteland isn't what I'm going for I had eggs on my balcony last year and those turned out to be stinkbugs, that was hilarious. Stinkbugs fuckin everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_shield_bug
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 22:00
|
|
|
I've got a hunch that might be a slime mold rather than eggs, given the speed and location it's appearing at. Time will tell! Since earwigs and parental care have both been mentioned, y'all might be interested to know earwigs are one of the few insects that engage in parental care. Females will look after their clutch until they hatch and are on their way.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 22:41
|
|
|
That would be pretty wild. Guess if by tomorrow it has spread to cover everything that would be a good indicator!
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 22:55
|
|
|
Wow before this ant thread I never knew how loving cool termites were
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2020 23:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 16, 2024 06:04 |
|
|
Good call with the slime mold, the lil white blobs turned brown and lifted up onto some stalks like insanely tiny mushrooms and are gone again already. I accidentally let the moisture drop to just barely above ambient bc I forgot to spray today so idk if that was their entire lifecycle or if they withered prematurely.
|
|
#
?
Sep 27, 2020 19:24
|
|