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Farecoal posted:Aww Lol - yeah, hope that they're related and it goes well. If so that'll be a really cool origin story for this badass colony!
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May 15, 2019 00:01
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| # ? Jun 14, 2024 17:49 |
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hey, why dont ants get sick they have little anty bodies ---------------- |
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May 15, 2019 00:58
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cda posted:hey, why dont ants get sick
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May 15, 2019 11:07
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It was her!! I tried to film them meeting again, but reflection, red light and my phone made it impossible. Seeing those two meeting was the cutest insect reunion special ever. They were going around and rubbing antenna and mandibles on each other and did so for like a minute. Seeing something like happiness in insects is truly something special! Also, another egg. I'm back in the game!!
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May 15, 2019 11:10
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  Hells yeah friend!!!!and cda posted:hey, why dont ants get sick
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May 15, 2019 11:22
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Stoner Sloth posted:
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May 15, 2019 15:08
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hooray! ant crew is back, baby |
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May 15, 2019 17:05
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Hey Ant Crew, best crew, got some shots of another type of ant that lives in my garden and that I see a lot of. Don't know much about these guys but here is a picture: These guys are about the length of a fingernail and are pretty quick. See them around in pretty good numbers. I don't think they're polygynous since they aren't nearly as numerous as the little tiny black ants here and don't seem to have multiple nest sites but rather there are several separate colonies on the property and you sometimes see them fighting. I could be wrong though. Any thoughts GaG?
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May 23, 2019 05:54
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Hmm, let's see. The numbers are not necessarily a defining factor, as a small colony simply does not yet have many workers and mono- or polygynic colonies do not necessarily lead to small or large colonies, as there are monogynic colonies that easily form colonies of up to 50 000 individuals (the limiting factor here is the lifetime of the queen plus her limited ability to lay eggs really), while polygynic colonies may contain 20 queens but still only have 500 workers. Black, long antenna, no post-petiolus, small gaster. Given the small mandibles I'd guess on Formicinae or Dolichoderinae. In general, black is a rather rare color for ants and only a handful of species are truly black, they mostly are rather brown or red, yellow or similar specific colors. I can't really tell if they are actually black or just dark brown, as that would open up a ton of more possibilities. Fingernail sounds like 2-4mm length? So for this guy it's very hard to tell given the information, as Australia hosts a ton of endemic ants and generally two-thirds of known subfamilies with thousands of species in total and he doesn't have any outstanding properties that makes it easier, in contrast to your bulldog ant you found in your kitchen. It's probably easier to exclude a number of possibilities: Formicinae would be super common, but isn't as often in Australia as it is everywhere else due to their never ending ant wars against other subfamilies that limits them. Even if so, Camponotus seems likely due to the color, but it's a bit small for that, while Formica and Lasius aren't really a thing at your place (but those tiny black ants might actually be Lasius, especially if they are at war with them). Myrmicinae is impossible given that he has a small single petiolus with a merged post-petiolus towards the gaster, while a separate cut between those two things are a defining feature for them. Ponerinae is possible for Australia, but they are quite small for that and also their rather small mandibles wouldn't be that common for them. If you say they are pretty quick, are they typically rushing back and forth, especially if your startle them? Because if so, among the Formicinae subfamily that would open up the possibility for Paratrechina, the Crazy Ants. Very common in Australia, rather small, opportunistic in where they nest and the over all appearance would fit. Specifically the black Paratrechina Longicornis, Longhorn Crazy Ant, would fit to the size of up to 3mm. They enjoy living in artificial areas and love to invade houses, too, as they take whatever they can find. They don't like it too arid though, but if you water your garden or it generally isn't dried out currently, that's not a problem. That's just a wild guess though given that they are very common and it would fit their general appearance. If they aren't truly black but brown at the size of up to 5mm that could be ~1000 different Australian species that would more or less fit the description. Feel free to try get more information on where or how they live, what their numbers are like, if they are currently sending out nuptial flights or how they react to you providing honey nearby! Might nail it down a bit more precisely.
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May 23, 2019 13:17
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a friend of mine once poured cooper down a ant hold they make awsome nest |
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May 24, 2019 15:16
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I think I solved the mystery! Thinking they might be an Iridomyrmex spp of 'meat ants'. Sub-family is Dolichoderinae. We also definitely get Camponotus spp of Formicinae around here too - I'll try and get some pics of them when I see them cause these 'sugar ants' are cool looking orange and black little dudes. Couldn't find what the smaller black ants are though - I'll try to get some photos up of them when they're swarming out with larvae and winged ants in the middle of thousands of workers.
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May 24, 2019 20:33
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Did think of those, yeah, but assuming they are truly black, I found it less likely, but yeah quite possible! What made you realize it's them? Australia is a crazy place to insects, you basically can get almost every known ant species minus a certain percentage of species that are endemic elsewhere or need colder climate, but apart from that for Australia it's almost a free for all. So much even, that the usual European and American ants are - comparably - less successful than the more specialized killer beasts that some of those monstrosities are. Still, they are wildly successful and still cover a good percentage of ant territory (which is like 90% of all Australia)
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May 24, 2019 21:17
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Yeah - was shocked at how many species there are. Didn't even know we had species of those gamergate things you mentioned living right near me! But I've always heard of them being called 'meat ants' and found a pdf which had ants of the adelaide hills and mount lofty ranges and the Iridomyrmex ones not only matched perfectly in terms of the described behaviour and appearance + pics but are also called meat ants colloquially so figure it's probably them  also they both have some reddish colouration on the head sometimes but are mostly black/dark brown.It's got me wondering about Tasmanian ants too - wonder if there are many species exclusive to there, causeTasmania seems to preserve a lot of really old, weird stuff.
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May 24, 2019 21:25
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Oh nice! That rocks Already a third of all ants in Australia are endemic there, not sure if Tasmania counts towards that number, but I read a lot already about ants there from a wide range of options. Slave ants, ant bread ants, honeypot ants (need to make an effort post on those), ant ants, it's all of them!! Need to look up if any super specials are around there, but I'm sure!
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May 24, 2019 23:46
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I'll try and find more to take their pictures - it's raining pretty hard now though so think they're all tucked up in their ant beds or at least busy below ground. ooh and honeypot ant sound interesting! Really great learning a bit about the local ants
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May 25, 2019 00:29
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oh also, have you seen this: http://antmaps.org/
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May 25, 2019 01:01
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Woah, I love that. I mean, obviously it's scary as gently caress that Queensland alone has more species than all of Europe combined, but this map is now going to take up some of my time!
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May 25, 2019 02:05
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Goons Are Great posted:Woah, I love that. I mean, obviously it's scary as gently caress that Queensland alone has more species than all of Europe combined, but this map is now going to take up some of my time! awesome, thought you might like it. And I guess I'd better forgive Queensland a bit for being full of Queenslanders given how many cool ants are there!!
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May 25, 2019 02:07
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TNs9hsz6b4 Okay so, I'm currently looking into the basics of how ants eat stuff. Sounds boring and weird to look into, but it actually is not, as with most insects, they are vastly different from us humans. In the unlikely case that you ever wondered why ants are so eager to carry away your picnic, let's take a quick and easy look into what ants love to eat. First off, you, my fellow human, are biologically speaking spoiled and used to a great variety of food, because we are omnivores and we can eat a lot of stuff. Our main diet might circle around meat and plants, but the details are lot more complicated, because we teamed up with a million different species to enable us to both eat berries, bread, grilled BBQ meat and flush it down with amazing cake. This, obviously, is not that common for other animals. There are other and even more adaptable omnivores in the world, but generalists sometimes are, well, too general to squeeze into specific ecological niches and they lose towards specialists that may only feed on a few things, but can process those better than we could. Ants are cheating on this concept a bit, because they can switch back and forth between being predators that kill other animals, omnivores that take your picnic away and sometimes granivores that feed on seed. They practically never can eat plants directly, because just as we humans, they are unable to process Cellulose, which plants are mostly made of. They didn't (in a meaningful scale) team up with bacteria to have them process that and then eat their bacteria poop, which is what we do in our colon, so they practically cannot eat plants. In fact, they cannot eat anything that isn't liquid at all, because of this:  That's an ant mouth. Without going much into detail here, you practically are looking at the parts of the ant jaw and its lips (they have that, anatomically speaking, but they are nothing like your lips that people want to kiss), plus the tongue. What ants need to do in order to eat with this weirdly looking setup is they use their mandibles and their maxilla (the brown thingy in the middle) to bite into their food and open and close it similar to how we chew, just on the outside, then they suck up the liquid along with single, miniature particles that flow in with them. The food then gets partly moved into their stomach and then professionally transformed into ant poop, but the majority is first saved in their social stomach (basically a holding cell sitting before the stomach itself) which they then carry around, bring it to their mother and sisters and puke into their mouths to feed them, too. Now, you may wonder, if they can't eat any solid food, why would they carry away your sausages? Well, first off, because they can simply chew through it and then suck up the sausage liquid. But once they did that and practically emptied the food out of liquid, they still bring the dried food into their nest. There they do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IctXHG3tc2U This is a tiny baby ant, a larva, feeding on solid food. Ant larvae can feed on solid food, because they actually have teeth:  You can see it in the top middle on that big segment. Right below that on those small indendations are what scientists called the "Mensarium", their "table" body. The larvae are fed with both stuff the adult ants sucked up into their social stomach as well as solid food, by having adult ants laying the dried solid food on their biological table and then slowly chew on it, just as shown in the video. This is truly special, because it means that ants figured out a way to use their own different life stages to process practically all the food they can find, despite their anatomical limits to do so. Most insects do have a regular egg -> larva -> pupa -> imago stage and for many the larvae eat differently than the adults do, but given ant eusociality it's amazing to think that they used this basic insects setup as their advantage to feed to colony with whatever they can find, making them really adaptable omnivores. And yes, if in desperate need for more food, they will first feed their larva dried food that they can't process and then eat the larva directly to also feed the adults with it, if necessary. To some probably hosed up degree though, I find those baby ants kinda cute. Look how he goes!!
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May 25, 2019 13:40
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That's really cool! |
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May 25, 2019 16:40
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xcheopis posted:That's really cool! |
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May 25, 2019 18:04
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xcheopis posted:That's really cool!  ants are magic!!
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May 25, 2019 23:50
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Manifisto posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EO6sXMd3sE |
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May 27, 2019 03:14
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That's badass
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May 27, 2019 12:26
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/do-ants-like-coffee |
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May 30, 2019 16:05
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That is absolutely spectacular! I read about Philidris sp. before and their habit of de facto farming certain plans for their own gain is very exciting, but their ability to even use such a special plant in such an extraordinary way is fantastic. Usually ants are unable to process fruits directly, but it is very much possible that they use their larvae to chew through it and extract the sweet juice, that they then can feed on. This kind of behavior is known for several ant genera if they are lacking proper alternatives like aphids or flower excretion, which of course is likely on a farm. I'd love to try some ant coffee right now.
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May 30, 2019 16:27
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I'd like to try it, too, but I probably wouldn't be able to notice anything different from my regular coffee. It's quite interesting, though! |
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May 31, 2019 00:55
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3856888&pagenumber=9&perpage=40#post495595258 Do ants party? Are they having raves in wasp houses? |
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Jun 3, 2019 03:32
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In general, yes. Ants probably see wasps and bees and bumblebees as the rich nerdy version of themselves and they are fascinatingly peaceful towards each other, not only because of wings but also because they just like to party together sometimes. Especially wasps like to hunt in the air, kill stuff and it falls down to the ants who then take whatever the wasps no longer want. As ants are generally vastly superior in numbers, they are probably partying a bit harder than wasps though. Those oak galls by the way are also super cool things, as they are basically the result of a tree fighting a parasitic infection caused by a gall wasp. They infect the tree with their larvae using their sting, the tree doesn't like that and reacts by growing a fruit around it to isolate the infection. The larvae then eat that fruit until they are grown-ups and leave the fruit nest. This party nest consisting out of a half-eaten fruit then is commonly used by a ton of various animals, birds love it, also mammals, but of course ants won't say no to the super sweet and sugar pumped thing. Especially honeypot ants, on which I wanted to do an effort post anyways, love to move in there and feed from the remains of the larvae party. Quite possible that they get some hard music going and rave the poo poo out of the tree, too!
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Jun 3, 2019 11:08
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Actually, this is done quite fast, so let's do it right away! I talked about food and how ants eat before and this is deeply connected to it, because eating food is not only important, it also raises problems that we humans had to figure out just as well as they had to: Storage. How do you store food if everyone seems to want it, including bacteria and fungi floating in the air. Food spoils, food stops being tasty, it started doing things you don't like, sometimes it can turn alive again and runs away from you, what the hell. Our solutions to this includes burying it in salt, put it into metal tubes that no longer contain air, heat it until it cries, remove any kind of moisture from it, freeze it to death or build monstrous machines that make stuff cold and permanently store it there. We are not the only species on earth that figured out a way to store food, it's a common thing for practically all animals that live in any kind of society. Others simply require permanent effort into generating fresh food, which is why many animals spend 70% of their time looking for that. Ants tackled this problem with various tactics, most of them I already mentioned before. Leafcutter ants eat a special fungus that grows on their gigantic underground farms that they build. Harvester Ants harvest seeds from a lot of plants, sort them carefully and then make bread out of it. Vampire Ants feed their larvae with way more than they require so they can, if needed, bite them and suck out their blood. Herding ants keep herds of aphids nearby the nest and eat their rear end and the sweet liquid that comes out of it and so on and so on. Honeypot ants thought, nah, this is way too much effort. Let's do it the chill way. We just eat:  And eat:  Get fat:  And chill:  Those aren't pregnant termites, those are still ants. Honeypot ants, too. It's not a taxonomical term, there is no specific genera or species that does this, but across the spectrum there are ants that do this. They developed the, for insects, insanely rare ability to store food in their body. They basically just are able to get fat. Now, this might not sound special, because you, my goon, probably heard about being fat before, but insects in general are unable to store stuff as body fat. For one, it would be insanely impractical to actually become fat if you are small and fast. Also, the process of storing sugar in fat is insanely complex, requires various highly complex hormones, space in the body and an evolutionary setup to eat food -> process it -> take a certain part of what isn't processed fast enough -> convert it into another chemical structure -> store it on appropriate spots that don't hinder other parts of the body in any way. So, this is not in fact fat, it's mostly honey. Just plain, pure and simple honey (or honeydew, or fruit juice, whatever those ants ate before). They social stomach is insanely big and has the ability to expand, which causes their gaster, which is science for "butt", to grow that big. They can easily store up to five times their own body weight in food. As they are hardly able to move at that point, they just literally hang around the nest and chill all day long, doing basically nothing. As soon as another ant comes to them and tickles their butt and antenna, they puke it up again and feed their sister. Yes, in various regions in the world, people collect those ants and eat them raw, as it's basically a nature version of a candy. You bite on it and it explodes in honey. It's a bit mean though. 
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Jun 3, 2019 12:04
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So if they eat meat, they aren't able to store it like that? |
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Jun 3, 2019 14:54
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Technically they are, as ants in general are unable to eat any solid food at all due to how their mouths work, as described in the food post above (except the garnivore baker ants we talked before, but even they can't directly eat the seeds but only their bread), so they are able to store the meat juice and the proteins in their social stomach in a similar fashion. However, they won't do that in any noticeable amount for various reasons: For one, Ants do not eat meat because they don't really enjoy it that much. Hunting insects is one hell of a dangerous job and it makes up easily up to 60% of ant time spent lurking, hunting and killing other insects. Almost 20% of all ant deaths happen because they get killed during the hunt (another 70% happen due to ant wars, rest due to age, diseases and similar stuff). Ants practically do not need the meat either, an adult ant, just like all insects, does not grow at all, they only need to keep the machine running which is fully done with sucking up sweet juices like honey or honeydew. There is only two kinds of ants that really need the meat: The queen(s) and the larvae. The larva is the only stage in ant life where it's able to grow in size and expand the body, it needs a ton of proteins for that. The queen does no longer grow, but she takes up the majority of the proteins in order to produce eggs, plus a small amount during foundation phase because her body is restructured towards egg production, while her gaster grows and her ovaries expand. Storing big amounts of proteins like they do it with honey is not necessary, because they can simply directly feed the queen and the larvae mainly eat solid food anyways, if available, so they simply carry it to them and feed them that way. For two, proteins are reactive chemical components and easily get broken down into other, directly digestible parts, even if it's inside something. A good reason of why honeypot ants store honey is not that it spoils (de facto it never does, but of course it's also never 100% pure, so it might at some point) but because honey and similar secrets are hygroscopic, meaning that they bind water to them. You can easily observe that if you take a small amount of honey on a small plate and watch it for a day. In no time it will be increased in volume and be a lot more liquid, that's because it took water from the air and got increasingly wet. After a few days, the honey will slowly turn into water and then evaporate. So it's better to suck it up and store it manually for later, plus this way it's save from other animals that also would like a lick. Storing proteins in your social stomach like that however might cause the proteins to simply be digested by the ant carrying it, by accident. That's why ants rarely use trophollaxis to feed their sisters with proteins, as it's safer and easier to just tell them to go out and also eat the prey directly - in order to improve that, they just carry it inside the nest. This way even the queen can take a bite without the need of the proteins being anywhere where they could fall apart into other things.
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Jun 3, 2019 23:34
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all very interesting I cannot say I actually want to try it, but it strikes me that ant wine could be a thing ant wine |
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Jun 3, 2019 23:37
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Amazing. Ants are magic - and look at those fat ant butts!!
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Jun 3, 2019 23:43
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 Now she just needs to drink some wine and it's a deal
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Jun 4, 2019 00:59
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How are your ant friends doing? |
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Jun 5, 2019 03:52
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oh poo poo an ant thread!! my camponotus japonicus girls love to eat bugs and shrimp and honey i got them about two weeks ago. i estimate there's about 50 of them and a ton of eggs. it's really entertaining watching them go about their day i'm gonna get them a bigger outworld later a7m2 fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 09:07
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Manifisto posted:all very interesting i live in china and my girlfriend's dad gave me ant wine once (just chinese rice wine with a ton of ants in it). it's gross |
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Jun 5, 2019 09:10
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a7m2 posted:oh poo poo an ant thread!! my camponotus japonicus girls love to eat bugs and shrimp and honey Hello friend, I like your ants! They look a lot like a type of ant in my backyard except mine are orange and black - but really similar looking otherwise. a7m2 posted:i live in china and my girlfriend's dad gave me ant wine once (just chinese rice wine with a ton of ants in it). it's gross I've had a gin flavoured with ants not that long ago that was pretty good - think they were a type of weaver ant. Gave a sort of peppery/citrusy taste to the drink but was pretty mild.
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Jun 5, 2019 09:55
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| # ? Jun 14, 2024 17:49 |
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xcheopis posted:How are your ant friends doing? Pretty good!  Currently we are battling with the heat because Jesus christ it's so hot and they are mostly staying indoors near the water to chill, but I regularly see a scout come out in the wild and check what's up. I did some adjustments to the outworld by swapping to to another, way smaller outworld (20x10cm instead of 20x30) so it's easier to find the food and stay clean, away from the plants and spring tails and oh yeah did I mention that my actual outworld kinda exploded in life?  I never planted anything in there, except the formerly small plant in the top left which I also didn't plant but simply relocated when I nuked the old outworld, it's all from seeds that came out of the air or various seeds that were leftovers when I fed the springtails. Apart from that the ants are chilling and enjoying life. I'm slowly getting the hang of properly cooling and watering the new nest, sometimes crazy physics happen and the moisture goes up for no apparent reason, but all in super okay numbers. Currently I'm looking at the queen plus her formerly lost worker, at least 15 eggs of which 6 hatched already, not entirely sure but I think 4 of the larvae also already are pupae, hard to say as they are stored on the corner currently.
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Jun 5, 2019 11:10
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