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Bug Squash
Mar 18, 2009

Good news regarding my Messor colony! I left the new queen with the lesser workers while I went on holiday for a week, and it looks like she's been accepted. There's one worker that now chills with her in her tube, and the rest seem content to hang around not killing her. I've added some of the medium workers back into her enclosure along with some dead fruit flies and hopefully we can get egg production going again.

There's a major worker still in the old enclosure that I think I'll leave there in a quiet retirement. She attacked the queen last time they met, and she's got a set of jaws on her like crab claws. Frankly she intimidates me a little, and could easily kill the queen if she wanted.

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Skanky Burns
Jan 9, 2009
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-19/unique-wa-plants-adapt-to-allow-for-ant-pollination/12350088

Ants are so crazy in Australia that plants adapt to them!

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
Out of curiousity what's the best way to kill and sterilize feeder insects? I'm assuming y'all don't just chuck in live animals like you would for say, a big arachnid.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Out of curiousity what's the best way to kill and sterilize feeder insects? I'm assuming y'all don't just chuck in live animals like you would for say, a big arachnid.

I think there's a risk to catching live insects re: grasshoppers because perhaps they can carry insecticides and bacteria. I think I've read the best thing to do is to freeze+boil caught feeders but honestly I just buy mine from the pet shop.

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Depending on the size of the animal I'd recommend killing and then boiling them over, that's what I usually do. Fruit flies I just cover in boiling water, crickets and bigger I usually cut through and then put them in boiling water for a minute. Afterwards I take them out, dry them using a paper towel and they're ready to go.
That should kill off pretty much all parasites and I do that disregarding if I bought or caught them, just to be safe.

Since I also got a scorpion and a spider, those need to get living crickets or bigger stuff, there I just try to make sure they're not visibly sick or infested. Roaches or locusts, as well as rodents and bigger guys, you also can wash a little before feeding, at least to check for obvious stuff.

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

In preparation for winter I had to remove the tubes connecting the first and the second outworld and by doing so I removed a small stone I offer water in. Underneath, again, I found another, newly constructed satellite nest my ants had built, full of larvae. I'm not sure why they do this for the larvae - pupae would make sense since it's a lot less humid there than in the nest and pupae don't like it too humid - but they've proven time and time again and they will take this satellite nest no matter what I try to do to convince them otherwise. The only explanation I have is that they have problems keeping the larvae from eating eggs and pupae - a common problem for all ant species, the larvae are blind and will try to eat literally everything in range of their mouths - and so they want to play safe.

Either way, by opening it up, I triggered full alarm, needed to distract them by using an attacking cricket to draw their attention away and then remove the tube next to the satellite nest. In there, I got a unique photo of this super cute ant:


A white ant!

This species is always very dark brown to deep black, so this is a special sight. It is, however, not an albino ant or something, it's actually a freshly hatched baby ant. She must have hatched from her cocoon a few hours ago, probably in the morning 4 to 7 hours ago. Her exoskeleton is not yet hardened and very very soft and vulnerable, it takes around 8 to 12 hours for it to harden fully, turning black. Usually these babies never, ever leave the nest as they are so vulnerable to everything, and due to the very short duration they look like this, it is extraordinarily rare to see one.

Poor little girl was completely lost, her antennae cannot smell very well yet as that, too, needs some time to harden and adjust. Also she is very sensitive to light, so she just stumbled across, helplessly looking for her sisters to lead the way. That did happen after a few seconds, another ant came by, grabbed her antenna with her mandible, and carefully led the way towards the nest.
In a few hours she'll be all black and fully functional, then she can tell the others her exciting story of how she got lost during complete chaos and thought the world has vanished around her.

Lima
Jun 17, 2012

Welcome to the world baby ant! :buddy:

JacquelineDempsey
Aug 6, 2008

Women's Circuit Bender Union Local 34



aphid_licker posted:

Suddenly there's what kinda looks like a gigantic amount of eggs in the terrarium :ohdear:

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?



This thread continues to entertain and educate! There's a spot by the river here (SW Virginia) that I like to sit at and sketch. There's one fallen tree that's comfy to sit on, and the other day when crouched down to fetch a pencil I'd dropped, I saw those same fuzzy white things attached to the underside of "my" tree! Was wondering what the heck it was, didn't seem like eggs but the clumpy nature (balls about the size a pea) didn't suggest fungus.

And yay, baby ant! Do ants hatch all at once, over the course of a few hours like most fish that I've kept do? And do they give indications that the hatching is imminent?

Like when my Jack Dempseys spawned, I'd wake up about 3 days after the eggs were laid, check the nest, and they'd be jiggling. Then I'd come home after work to "welp, now I have 2+100 Jack Dempseys".

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo

Goons Are Great posted:

In preparation for winter I had to remove the tubes connecting the first and the second outworld and by doing so I removed a small stone I offer water in. Underneath, again, I found another, newly constructed satellite nest my ants had built, full of larvae. I'm not sure why they do this for the larvae - pupae would make sense since it's a lot less humid there than in the nest and pupae don't like it too humid - but they've proven time and time again and they will take this satellite nest no matter what I try to do to convince them otherwise. The only explanation I have is that they have problems keeping the larvae from eating eggs and pupae - a common problem for all ant species, the larvae are blind and will try to eat literally everything in range of their mouths - and so they want to play safe.

Either way, by opening it up, I triggered full alarm, needed to distract them by using an attacking cricket to draw their attention away and then remove the tube next to the satellite nest. In there, I got a unique photo of this super cute ant:


A white ant!

This species is always very dark brown to deep black, so this is a special sight. It is, however, not an albino ant or something, it's actually a freshly hatched baby ant. She must have hatched from her cocoon a few hours ago, probably in the morning 4 to 7 hours ago. Her exoskeleton is not yet hardened and very very soft and vulnerable, it takes around 8 to 12 hours for it to harden fully, turning black. Usually these babies never, ever leave the nest as they are so vulnerable to everything, and due to the very short duration they look like this, it is extraordinarily rare to see one.

Poor little girl was completely lost, her antennae cannot smell very well yet as that, too, needs some time to harden and adjust. Also she is very sensitive to light, so she just stumbled across, helplessly looking for her sisters to lead the way. That did happen after a few seconds, another ant came by, grabbed her antenna with her mandible, and carefully led the way towards the nest.
In a few hours she'll be all black and fully functional, then she can tell the others her exciting story of how she got lost during complete chaos and thought the world has vanished around her.

Weird to think she’s all grown up now.

This thread has made me stop and stare and be fascinated by ants like when I was a little kid and I love it. There’s a colony living in a crack in the asphalt right outside my place and I’ve decided they’re my best pals. I keep meaning to take a picture of them and post it to see if y’all can tell me what species they are. They were dismantling a pigeon carcass this morning. Feast, little friends.

Bug Squash
Mar 18, 2009

Slime mold aren't actually a fungus, they are collection of strange groups that are entirely separate. In fact, plants, fungus and animal are more closely related to each other than we are to any slime mold group. Some of them act like one giant weird cell smeared over the ground, and some of them act like millions of separate amoeba up until they decide to clump together and sporulate. They are all very strange, and my rule of thumb if I can't identify something then it's probably a slime mold fruiting body.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
Apparently there are "ant crickets" that join up with yellow crazy ants! The yellow crazy ants seem to think they're like long lost cousins or something and feed them and give them stuff to do.

"How do you do fellow ants?"

Bug Squash
Mar 18, 2009

Raenir Salazar posted:

Apparently there are "ant crickets" that join up with yellow crazy ants! The yellow crazy ants seem to think they're like long lost cousins or something and feed them and give them stuff to do.

"How do you do fellow ants?"
I know a lot of species that live with ants, never in my life heard of these ant crickets. Amazing.

Semirelated: A lot of stick insect species have the very first stage after hatching look like an ant. Lot of stick insect eggs get picked up by ants (some even have a little nutritious handle that gets nibbled off by the ants), so lots of stick insects hatch out in ant nests. They aren't particularly sofisticated mimics, so they mostly just run at very non-stick insect speeds and get out of Dodge as fast as they can before a real ant notices the difference. After the first moult they them slow down and look like a stick.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
Haha, basically the "I made this!" meme.

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


JacquelineDempsey posted:

This thread continues to entertain and educate! There's a spot by the river here (SW Virginia) that I like to sit at and sketch. There's one fallen tree that's comfy to sit on, and the other day when crouched down to fetch a pencil I'd dropped, I saw those same fuzzy white things attached to the underside of "my" tree! Was wondering what the heck it was, didn't seem like eggs but the clumpy nature (balls about the size a pea) didn't suggest fungus.

And yay, baby ant! Do ants hatch all at once, over the course of a few hours like most fish that I've kept do? And do they give indications that the hatching is imminent?

Like when my Jack Dempseys spawned, I'd wake up about 3 days after the eggs were laid, check the nest, and they'd be jiggling. Then I'd come home after work to "welp, now I have 2+100 Jack Dempseys".

I know next to nothing about fungi but my impression is that they can look like anything whatsoever. Seriously, there are some wildass looking fungi out there.

Terrarium update, I had two actual mushrooms sprout in there and had to evict more pillbugs. No mold tho, which is nice, and it still smells properly wet-forest-y. Any time pillbugs are mentioned on gardening forums there'll be some bleeding heart do-gooder who says to leave them alone, they only eat rotting material but man lemme tell you, these guys will absolutely shred anything that looks like a plant.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

aphid_licker posted:

I know next to nothing about fungi but my impression is that they can look like anything whatsoever. Seriously, there are some wildass looking fungi out there.

Terrarium update, I had two actual mushrooms sprout in there and had to evict more pillbugs. No mold tho, which is nice, and it still smells properly wet-forest-y. Any time pillbugs are mentioned on gardening forums there'll be some bleeding heart do-gooder who says to leave them alone, they only eat rotting material but man lemme tell you, these guys will absolutely shred anything that looks like a plant.

Why not let the ants eat them or is this terrarium not really for ants?

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

JacquelineDempsey posted:


And yay, baby ant! Do ants hatch all at once, over the course of a few hours like most fish that I've kept do? And do they give indications that the hatching is imminent?

Like when my Jack Dempseys spawned, I'd wake up about 3 days after the eggs were laid, check the nest, and they'd be jiggling. Then I'd come home after work to "welp, now I have 2+100 Jack Dempseys".

They don't really sync their hatch rate, but the other ants decide when it's time to hatch, usually based on movement inside the cocoon. The ready to hatch ant inside the cocoon does not have strong enough mandibles to cut through the silk, so when ready they move back and forth and try to chew on the cocoon, which indicates their will to hatch. Then another brood worker ant comes by and cuts open the cocoon from outside to let them out, sometimes they also do so a little earlier than usual if they need mandibles on deck. Afterwards she wanders around the nest, gets to know her sisters and perhaps even her royal majesty and waits for her exoskeleton to harden.

This is the rather primal way of hatching. Evolutionary advanced species even got rid of the cocoon altogether, as it's a remnant from the past when protecting the babies with silk was necessary, as civil war broke lose and endangered unborn kids to be killed by overthrowing ant renegades (as still happens in some primal ant species and those lacking a specified queen caste). Many temperate species today kept the cocoon for climate regulation reasons by now, but it's of lesser use now compared to then.

Super modern ants, basically the evolutionary beta, actually developed these:

Naked pupae. The ant is going through metamorphosis like this, not making a cocoon anymore. These ants just wake up when done, their exoskeleton hardens a lot faster and they can get started easier than they could when breaking through the cocoon, plus it saves resources and allows them to get rid of the silk organs in favor of new stuff.

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


Raenir Salazar posted:

Why not let the ants eat them or is this terrarium not really for ants?

Ya I'm still posting in here out of inertia but I veered from the ant project into a forest moss terrarium thingy instead

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Goons Are Great posted:

They don't really sync their hatch rate, but the other ants decide when it's time to hatch, usually based on movement inside the cocoon. The ready to hatch ant inside the cocoon does not have strong enough mandibles to cut through the silk, so when ready they move back and forth and try to chew on the cocoon, which indicates their will to hatch. Then another brood worker ant comes by and cuts open the cocoon from outside to let them out, sometimes they also do so a little earlier than usual if they need mandibles on deck. Afterwards she wanders around the nest, gets to know her sisters and perhaps even her royal majesty and waits for her exoskeleton to harden.

This is the rather primal way of hatching. Evolutionary advanced species even got rid of the cocoon altogether, as it's a remnant from the past when protecting the babies with silk was necessary, as civil war broke lose and endangered unborn kids to be killed by overthrowing ant renegades (as still happens in some primal ant species and those lacking a specified queen caste). Many temperate species today kept the cocoon for climate regulation reasons by now, but it's of lesser use now compared to then.

Super modern ants, basically the evolutionary beta, actually developed these:

Naked pupae. The ant is going through metamorphosis like this, not making a cocoon anymore. These ants just wake up when done, their exoskeleton hardens a lot faster and they can get started easier than they could when breaking through the cocoon, plus it saves resources and allows them to get rid of the silk organs in favor of new stuff.

I think my Myrmica do it this way?

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.
Interesting thread but let me be (I think) the first one to say "gently caress ants".

I hate them and they creep me right out with their chilling efficiency, naked aggression and willingness to self sacrifice. I live in Florida and jesus christ I swear to god the fire ants that live here have it on for me. I've been severely stung or swarmed at least 5 times by these motherfuckers.

When I first moved here the first time I learned about these special little guys, I went to a party and kicked off my canvas boat shoes by the front door. As I was driving home, I began to experience what I can only describe as a burning injection into my foot and between my toes. I couldn't figure it out but my foot literally felt like it was on fire. Turns out, a bunch of fire ants crawled into my shoe. My foot swelled up like an eggplant and was covered in these tiny, puss oozing blisters for over a week. I couldn't wear sneakers or anything besides sandals or flip flops.

The second time, I was sitting and fishing along the river, leaned down resting my left hand on the ground to do something and stuck it right in a nest without realizing it. A half hour later, I was having trouble breathing and my arm started to look like a sweet potato, cutting off the circulation to my hand and sending me to the ER.

You'd think at this point I'd learn to watch where I sit and walk but nope. This time I sat almost directly on top of a nest while wearing shorts and they hosed up my thigh and lower calf. I was really terrified they were crawling on me, were making their way up my towards my crotch and did what I'm sure must have been a really entertaining dance for everyone in the park. Again, I swelled up like the elephant man.

I've learned to be more careful but those bitches seem to have it out for me and can sense my extreme allergy. I've caught some subsequent stings while doing yard work and poo poo but have gotten substantially better with my "don't sit on the ground in Florida" and "Always wear shoes" policy.

...

Ants (and hornets and wasps) just give my the heebie jeebies. They look so MEAN close up and watching them swarm on anything with that angry herd mentality skeeves me right the gently caress out. Sorry to interrupt everyone's Ant Love discussion but I figured I'd way in from an alternative angle of "gently caress them". It only takes maybe 4 or 5 concentrated stings for wherever I was attacked to swell up like a balloon and make that part of my body look like I'm wearing a fat suit.

I know it's my fault for disturbing their nest but holy poo poo I find them terrifying and those fuckers won't listen to explanation or reason.

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Raenir Salazar posted:

I think my Myrmica do it this way?

Ya most Myrmica are known to do this. The usually big nests, huge numbers and often polygynous nature of most species enabled them to reduce extra protection in favor of efficiency.

BiggerBoat posted:


I know it's my fault for disturbing their nest but holy poo poo I find them terrifying and those fuckers won't listen to explanation or reason.

Heh that's fine, I totally get if someone doesn't like ants or their typically aggressive behavior. They believe they own this planet as much as we do and you're around as allergic to them as they are to your foot inside their nest. :eng101:
It's like how people usually hate flies and mosquitoes for being dicks, but it's in their nature to behave the way they do just as it's in our nature to be annoyed by them. We are largely incompatible to each other.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
I wish I had a colony of Solenopsis Geminata or Invictus up here. :(

My Myrmica rubra are basically the closest I got. So far while my campos all entered hibernation early, my rubra still seem active.

My pharaoh's seem to have a massive pile of eggs assuming my eyes aren't tricking me. They're also excavating into the cotton and digging into it for material.

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Pharaohs are ruthless :sun:

My Lasius seem to finally get the call of nature to move their larvae out of the reconstructed satellite nest now that I'm cooling them down slowly from 20 to right now 15°C over the past few days. I've seen them moving larvae around into the nest.
I hope I can get the pupae out of the cooker before November hits and they go to full sleep mode, last year they lost quite some brood over freezing babies, which nourished them early in spring but still was a bummer. Poor babies. :smith:

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.

Goons Are Great posted:

Heh that's fine, I totally get if someone doesn't like ants or their typically aggressive behavior. They believe they own this planet as much as we do and you're around as allergic to them as they are to your foot inside their nest. :eng101:

It's like how people usually hate flies and mosquitoes for being dicks, but it's in their nature to behave the way they do just as it's in our nature to be annoyed by them. We are largely incompatible to each other.

Except they simply refuse to accept my humble and sincere apologies whenever I gently caress up. I'm not looking for trouble with these jerks. My handwritten letter to the nest I stepped on went unanswered and was never even acknowledged. Yeah, real classy, ants.

Also, that hiding in my shoe, laying in wait, total dickhead ambush and stinging me on my drive home from a party was some bullshit so they loving started it as far as I'm concerned. I almost wrecked my car flopping my foot around the gas and the break pedals and it wasn't like I put sugar cubes or bread crumbs in my disgusting canvas boat shoe to lead them on either. They planned that poo poo.

As we stand in this moment in time, ants can all get hosed and are free to contact my attorney.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
Latest news from the throne of the Pharaohs!




Yup that's brood.

Helith
Nov 5, 2009

Basket of Adorables


Australian ant news. We're being invaded by ants! Well, more than usual.

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...vationists-warn

quote:


Yellow crazy ant infestation could spread to Queensland's wet tropics, conservationists warn
Calls for urgent funding from state and federal governments to deal with one of the world’s worst invasive species


One of the world’s worst invasive species could spread into Queensland’s wet tropics world heritage area unless there is urgent intervention from the state and federal governments, conservationists have warned.

Yellow crazy ants, which spit formic acid and can form supercolonies that overwhelm native species, have long been an issue in the country’s north, including in Cairns where they have encroached on the world heritage area.

Now a taskforce working for the Invasive Species Council has discovered a new infestation near Alligator Creek in Townsville, less than 5km from protected parklands known for species not found anywhere else.

The organisation wrote to the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, and Queensland’s agriculture minister, Mark Furner, last month, asking them to jointly fund a program to manage or eradicate the pest from the coastal city.

Its chief executive, Andrew Cox, wrote that significant conservation areas were at risk due to complacency from governments and a lack of adequate resourcing to manage the problem and stop ant colonies from spreading.

“It’s getting more urgent,” Cox said. “We need movement controls in place but they don’t have any in Townsville because they don’t have the resources.”

The new infestation is the fifth to be found in Townsville. Cox said one, near the residential area of Nome, was under control, but three others were expanding with little management over the past year.

The new site near Alligator Creek is 4.5km from the Mount Elliot section of the Bowling Green Bay national park, which Cox said was an area with “exceptional species endemism and is a critical climate refuge”.

He said the park was habitat for unique frogs and lizards, as well as a slug that is only found near the summit of Mount Elliot.

One of the other infestations is at Black River, about 8km from the southern extent of the wet tropics world heritage area and close to the Clemant state forest, the only known location of the critically endangered Gulbaru gecko.

Yellow crazy ants typically prey on small insects and lizards but are dangerous to many animals including birds and household pets, which can be blinded in an attack.

The invasive species gets into vegetation and gardens and can easily spread via activities such as earth moving or the transporting or dumping of garden waste.

Genetic analysis of two new infestations discovered in 2019 and 2020 at Shute Harbour in the Whitsundays found the ants were likely to be linked to outbreaks in Townsville.

The Invasive Species Council said significant work had been done to manage the feral pest around Cairns. But funding cuts, made years ago under the former Newman government, had left Townsville city council “picking up the slack” in the absence of more support.

“They’re limping along,” Cox said. “We’re saying they need $3m a year, shared equally between the state and federal governments.”

A spokesman for Ley said she was reviewing the letter and would monitor the response from the Queensland government.

“The Australian government may also become involved in pest issues where there is a threat to a matter of national environmental significance such as in the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage area,” he said.

He said the government had committed $9m over three years – matched by the Queensland government – to address yellow crazy ant infestations in and adjacent to the world heritage area. But Cox said this money was targeted at Cairns and a slightly smaller pool of funding was needed for Townsville.

In a letter to the Invasive Species Council, Furner said the council would need to show how “re-infestation” of Townsville would be prevented during and after a proposed management program.

He told Guardian Australia that such information was required because the proposal called for a commitment of about $30m over 10 years. Furner added that yellow crazy ants had been deemed non-eradicable, which meant new incursions could occur.

“We will always work with key stakeholders on the best way to manage risks from pests and weeds,” he said.

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


https://twitter.com/DanielKronauer/status/1317099062823444483

Edgar Allen Ho
Apr 3, 2017

by sebmojo
https://twitter.com/batshaped/statu...ber%3D1621pti22

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

I know the future is going to be ant protein to replace burger meat but this seems a little sudden!

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Formic acid does taste a lot like lemon, yeah.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

Goons Are Great posted:

Formic acid does taste a lot like lemon, yeah.

This reminds me how we cultivated spicy foods for eating despite the fact that the spiceness was an evolutionary adaptation meant to protect these plants from predators! :eng101:

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

Raenir Salazar posted:

This reminds me how we cultivated spicy foods for eating despite the fact that the spiceness was an evolutionary adaptation meant to protect these plants from predators! :eng101:

And now huge numbers of these plants are growing all over the world. It worked!

snergle
Aug 3, 2013

A kind little mouse!
i have these tiny little ants crawl into my dogs food bowl and i just lightly tap it onto the ground to get them out. am i hurting them? im legitimatally just trying to get them out because i just trained my dog to stop eatting ants and im afraid she will relapse if i let her eat an ant.

before you ask on a walk she stoped to dig alittle and i was watching her but once she dug it up i quickly realised it was a bone with a million little ants on it and i grabbed it out of her mouth but in those few seconds she ate ants. she eventually started just licking them up off the ground and because ants can carry ant poison ide prefer if she didnt eat ants.

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Yeah it's better to not have your pets eat feral ants, just in case someone nearby is poisoning them.
An easy trick to always pick up ants without harming them is by using a fluffy ball of cotton wool. They'll get stuck on it and it's soft enough to not damage the in general very stable exoskeleton. I'd doubt you hurt them before though, if you can pick them up and they run away after letting down, they're probably fine.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice
On the other hand feral/wild ants are like, probably very probably well established and like, you're own health and comfort and your pet's health and comfort is the priority.

Lets not dwell on how I let my bathroom get overrun by pharaoh's for weeks though... :kiddo:

(In fairness, I did end up capturing them and now the numbers of workers in my bathroom has dropped considerably).

Also the ant keeping discord suggests that my pharaoh queen will likely at some point lay queen eggs who will probably commit incest with their siblings and soon I'll have an infinite supply of queens; is this probable? Because I got people in the discord lining up around the block wanting to buy/trade me for spare pharaonis queens; for some reason these hillbilly ants are absurdly popular in Canada.

The explanation I got is that they are kinda like a "legal" species of exotics in a country where its really difficult in importing such species unless someone is lucky and managed to grab "greenhouse" ants (i.e exotic ant colonies imported via importing tropical plants).

fake edit: Why did you change your name! Very suss!

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Pharaoh queens are hard to get, so yeah this seems reasonable. :sun:
The incest part can happen, yup. Due to the nature of ant intercourse, where one queen mates with dozens of males, incest is a relative term here and it's getting increasingly likely and genetically fine to engage in sex between ant siblings, as the recombination of genetic material makes it increasingly likely that new stuff will happen and bad stuff cannot stay in there well. It still, however, drastically limits the genetic material and thus offers risk for the babies, but ants are in general quite good at house keeping their genetic backyard and will relentlessly kill individuals that engage in biologically bad behavior, which is why mega colonies can happen and thrive so extremely well.

So yes, this is quite probable and people will happily get in line to get a healthy pharaoh queen of yours!

aphid_licker
Jan 7, 2009


Def tell me if my using this as the generic crawly creature thread is unwelcome but this is pretty wow:

https://twitter.com/just_whatever/status/1319232676684025856

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice

aphid_licker posted:

Def tell me if my using this as the generic crawly creature thread is unwelcome but this is pretty wow:

https://twitter.com/just_whatever/status/1319232676684025856

That honestly kind of freaks me out. Lovecraftian vibes.

Goons Are Gifts
Jan 1, 1970

Holy loving poo poo that is absolutely amazing

Tree Bucket
Apr 1, 2016

R.I.P.idura leucophrys
2022 ends with me being devoured by a swarm of reanimated Russian ice worms

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Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

"According to Wikipedia" there is a black hole that emits zionist hawking radiation where my brain should have been

I really should just shut the fuck up and stop posting forever
College Slice




That's a startling and disturbing number of queens all of a sudden.

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