|
I'm am ant keeper myself! I've just finished feeding before I found this thread, but I can photograph my crappy sub 100 worker Lasius colonies next time. I studied entomology for a while and even worked in a beneficial insectory. GAG clearly knows a lot more about ants than I do but I can tackle some of the general invertebrate questions.
|
#
¿
Aug 26, 2020 21:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 14:20 |
|
|
Organza Quiz posted:I told my mother about this thread and she has a question! She's been seeing ants in her garden which appear to be carrying other ants. She thought it was just dead ants they were carrying at first but has noticed that they also carry other living ants. Why would they be doing that? We're in Australia. There's a few possible reasons and it's hard to say exactly which is right. If most of the colony has decided to leave a part of the nest they can just pick-up any dissenters and bodily move them rather than wait for them to get with the program. I sometimes see a chain of living and dead ants being carried in my garden when there's a fight between neighbouring colonies. The dead ants are probably being carried back as food, but I've never been certain about the live ants. I assume they're either crippled or else being carried toward the nest in so they can be ganked in safety.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2020 07:03
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:I've been ant keeping for a while and love this content! I got some pictures over in the Ant keeping thread if you wanna look: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3880473#post507051775 There's at least four ant threads on this goddamn forum now. We need to rationalise this.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2020 21:34
|
|
|
In the UK at least these are called nanitics. I've had a few live for a whole year, but mostly they do their job of getting another few batchs of larvae fed up and then die.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2020 13:42
|
|
|
Here's a quick overview of my ants! I have five colonies ongoing at the moment. One Messor barbarus, and four Lasius niger. My set-ups are very humble at the moment as I have a small house (drat you Britain), and a very curious toddler, so everything has to be tidy and self-contained. This is also why my Messor colony is in a very bad way. The queens are very susceptable to stress, and unfortunately I lost the queen of a successful colony, and her replacement decided to eat all her eggs in responce to my kid bumping into the wardrobe she lives on. Currently I'm doing the desperation tactic of trying to introduce the new queen to the old colony, which is risky as gently caress since the workers will butcher her if she doesn't smell like the old colony. Right now she's sitting in a test tube with some gauze seperating her from the colony, which will hopefully let her pick up the colony smell. I forgot to take picture of one of my Lasius colonies (never mind), but here's the remaining three. Diet is mainly fruit flies, but I'm adding in mealworms and crickets.   This is a real neat little set-up from antskit.uk . It lets you slot a test-tube nest directly into a slick modern arena. So far it's been very successful for this one year old colony.  What a crap photo! Sorry. This is actually a very successful colony, although you wouldn't know from the look of this. At one year old, they have somewhere between 60 to 80 workers. Test tubes and tupperware are annoyingly some of my most succesful set-ups.   These ladies are probably going to be hitting a hundred workers soon, judging by how many larvae they have. I've moved them into a 3d printed set-up from antsantsuk. It's... interesting. It has a perspex sheet held on by tiny molydynium magnets, which makes me very nervous but seems to work. The plan was that the colony would move into the new nest, and then I would create a foraging arena connected to it by tubes. My kid has gotten real grabby lately, and they aren't moving anyway, so the new nest is basically a playground for them at the moment. I have big plans if I ever get a secure place to put them in, but for now I'm just building up numbers in humble containers.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 21:09
|
|
|
Introduction of my Messor queen into the old colony has been aborted. They seemed to be accepting her, but one of the medium workers then latched onto a leg and started pulling. It could have been that she had been so accepted that the worker was forcefully dragging her to a new home, but I've decided to play it safe and give her a little bit longer in her test tube to gather up colony smell.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 10:56
|
|
|
I actually helped look after the only UK research colony for a bit. It was just a set of big plastic tubs that we threw wood into every so often. Whole set-up was kept in a metal temperature control room. Technically, it was easy as pie. I would not recommend trying it at home since it would be illegal as all hell and an escape could permanently damage your home/neighborhood/country.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 11:19
|
|
|
My research colony came from a colony that had established in Devon for a few years until we wiped it out, so they can definitely survive temperate conditions, and European species are gradually spreading north with climate change. These species that are easy to keep are also the species are a bit boring with less specialised castes, so it's never been much of a temptation for me.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2020 15:33
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 27, 2020 20:20
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2020 21:00
|
|
|
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. 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.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2020 21:13
|
|
|
OGS-Remix posted:Well I guess I do have Argentinian ants because the baits were not enough to kill all the queens. Soapy water should do the job just fine. Pheromone trails are by design fragile and temporary, and need constant reapplication by the ants. If they weren't, ants would be constantly following old trails.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2020 10:42
|
|
|
A dead ant is a potential threat to the colony. Mites, nemotoads, bacteria and fungus will transfer from a dead host to a live one. Transfering the body away from the colony is a good approach to minimise this risk. Why they designate a graveyard/waste-tip rather than just carrying it a certain distance away from the colony, I don't know. My guess is that it's safer to have a single spot to put all your trash rather than everyone doing their own thing.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2020 19:34
|
|
|
My colonies tend to throw their dead onto the nearest piece of stale food, so my guess is all they're doing is bee-lining to the smelliest place nearby but not too close to chuck their dead and other garbage. Wouldn't be surprised to hear that there's some clever decision making going on regarding rubbish dumping.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2020 23:26
|
|
|
Kanine posted:im confused about something relating to ants and evolution So every ant contains the genetic sequence to create all of the castes in the colony, but only the queen and drones breed. So how do worker genes pass down through the generations? Quite simply, because they improve the chances of a queen reproducing and passing on those worker genes. A mutation in the queen that leads to her producing workers that are "better" in some way will go on to have more queens and drones, and so the gene becomes more common in the species. You might like to think of it as a similar way to how your body is specialised into different organs. No liver or heart cell has ever created a new human being, but your germ cells (the lineage of cells that are set aside for reproduction) contain all the information to produce them. Better liver or heart cells lead to a better support system for the germ cells, so any mutation in the germ cells that has that effect goes on to make more humans. There are indeed lots of semi-social animals, that you could think of as being "transitional". Some of my favourite examples are gall aphids, which produce specialised soldier aphids to defend their homes from rival aphids. Some species of parasitic wasp which lay their eggs inside insects actually have some of their young remain as larvae and grow larger mandibles to kill off the young of other wasps trying to inject into the same caterpillar. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 22, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 16:53
|
|
|
A ruin storm has hit the UK, so I've brought my colonies in from the shed. They can tank a normal UK winter in there, but probably not -20 C crazy town winters.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2021 13:05
|
|
|
crazyvanman posted:This thread is super cool, thanks! Those ants were definitely dragging that newt home to eat. They are soft skinned and not very fast, so if one gets caught out of water by enough ants then it's toast. Those dead ants were either the remains of a battle between rival colonies of ants, or a graveyard. Nearby colonies compete intensely for resources, and will fight each other to the death. If it's a graveyard, then it's a designated place that ants will carry dead siblings to. A dead ant is a potential infection risk to the colony, so keeping them away from the best helps keep it safe.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2021 08:36
|
|
|
Good alternatives to feeder insects are a) scraps of meat b) bit of egg c) protein jelly for reptiles You can also get seed eater ants, like Messor barbarus.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2021 08:59
|
|
|
Meat goes off, unfortunately, so no giant steaks for the colony. Gotta change the food out at least once a week, if not sooner, or the ants will just start piling soil around it to wall off the rotting meat. I'll usually give them a little bit of beef mince if I'm cooking with it, or maybe a little bit of scrap chicken before it becomes stock, and it tends to be pretty popular. I've seen people talk about using dried dog food, and I've given it a try but never had any success. Maybe I just have choosey ants, after spoiling them on fruitflies and offcuts.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2021 23:22
|
|
|
I've been setting up some new formicariums, and decided to try out some play sand as a medium. The good news is that the small particle size means it can hold a lot of moisture and it's extremely easy for my ants to build and excavate. They've been building huge weird archways and structures with the stuff, and buried a few of the artificial plants in the nest box. The reason this is a bad idea I discovered a week later when I pipetted water into the nest. Turns out any water flow causes the tunnels and structures to completely disintegrate, so now I'm forced to only add water to one corner of the enclosure and hope the ants mostly don't build there.  I'm gradually scooping out some of the sand bit by bit and I'll add in some soil substrate for the ants to mix in. I think once we've got a blend going in here to give some support that will be ideal.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2021 15:36
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:I'd like to put mine in a terrarium but I don't know how I would handle their hibernation needs. It's fairly modest set-ups, size wise. I bought this https://bugzarre.co.uk/Ant-Housing-Arena-Vented and they accidently sent me two of the larger containers (which are actually different looking from the ones pictured here and look really nice). Despite the budget price, they're actually really nice containers. Fit cleanly in the gap between my stationary cupboard and the lowest shelf of my book case. Since I wound up with two large ones, I made the jump and moved my two Tupperware colonies into them as nests. All I've done is put the test tube nests straight into them after half filling them with sand. The queens and young are mostly remaining in the tubes, which I'm happy with since there's no chance of collapse.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2021 18:54
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:Why are some crazy ants attracted to electricity? What's beneficial about that/what other factors led to them developing that behavior? It's warm is my guess which means faster larval development, same reason the xenomorphs built their nest over the reactor. They probably don't sense the electricity at all.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2021 22:50
|
|
|
Crickets can put up a surprisingly good fight. A friend of mine gave his mantis nymphs a serving of cricket nymphs, and the next day only about five of the hundred odd mantises hadn't been eaten.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2021 18:42
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Hrm, maybe I'll crush them again; I thought Rubra seemed aggressive enough to take em' out but maybe not. They're probably a bit more caughtious as it's a young colony. Crickets are only a danger if they catch you moulting, in which case, hey, free protein. For ants this shouldn't be a problem as anyone vulnerable should be safely in the nest.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2021 19:24
|
|
|
I'd call that termite / ant video "cooperation" in the same sense I'd call World War One trench warfare "cooperation".
|
|
#
¿
Aug 4, 2021 06:44
|
|
|
It never fails to crack me up that eusocial aphids have a dedicated soldier class. Come the gently caress on, an aphid is going to beat something up? Some parasitic wasps that lay oodles of eggs in a single caterpillar actually have a few that develop into dedicated soldier larvae that die with host and only exist to attack larvae from other parent wasps. Not strictly eusocial on technicalities sadly.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2021 15:55
|
|
|
Not a group I know anything about, but I'd be comfortable guessing that just because they lack trail pheromone wouldn't mean they lack all pheromones. I'm guessing they are still capable of putting their panic pheromone for when the nest is under attack, and can recognise colony smells and queen behavioural cues. Also, I really don't like comparing trails to neurons. It's just a trail. I do think it's valid to describe the collective behaviour of a nest as "intelligent", but it's worth bearing in mind that an individual ant is still vastly more intelligent and focused on different tasks.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2021 22:45
|
|
|
Goons Are Great posted:Most bee species, however, are not eusocial but solitary bees. Only the honeybees you know and love form hives Don't forget bumblebees!
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2022 21:15
|
|
|
Flight is extremely energetically expensive. If you have a way of life that doesn't absolutely require flight, you can put that energy to much more efficient uses. Insects that do commit to flight for their way of life are pretty much constantly in our faces, so we have a bit of a bias from what we see. Most insects, while capable of flight, either live mostly on foot or have flight only for brief reproductive adult phases. Pretty much the biggest boost you get from flight is for dispersing your genes, so males can travel farther to find unrelated females, and mated female can find suitable nesting sites to lay eggs. This is so useful that it means losing flight entirely is relatively rare in insects, and when it does happen it's often an evolutionary dead end. Ants obviously get their cake and eat it by having flight entirely on the specialist reproductive caste, while gaining extremely efficient ground based foragers. The sheer biomass of ants demonstrates that this is a very effective strategy, many orders of magnitude more than the social wasps and bees combined.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2022 18:23
|
|
|
Broadly, that's what vulture bees do already except with meat
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2022 22:10
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:
Just an incredible food source in my experience. Extremely easy for almost every carnivorous species to eat, and maintained with a banana every month or so.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2022 17:21
|
|
|
An ant that senses danger can put out a pheromone that agitated the entire colony into high aggression, but I've never heard of any system where an ant goes out to recruit additional defenders. It's not impossible, but it would involve losing defenders in the critical short term of an attack.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2022 20:45
|
|
|
That is exactly why I keep my outworlds with a minimum of substrate. I had a queen just up and decant into some inappropriate tunnels once and it was a right bother.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2023 08:28
|
|
|
Speaking as someone who helped look after a research colony of termites, it's a very bad idea.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2023 20:48
|
|
|
Yellow jacket behaviour in Autumn has a lot of things feeding into it. A wasp professor described it to me as a mix of "dementia" and drunkenness from fermented fruit.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 2, 2023 19:35
|
|
|
 Example, from elsewhere in SA. Plastic test tubes can be bought online for dirt cheap, and cotton wool can be bought anywhere. A test tube nest can happily do a colony for over a year, and even then when they're ready to move on you usually want to just pull the cotton wool top off and put the whole thing into their new house. This example has some seeds in it for a seed eater species. In general you want to give them nothing until after they overwinter and have their first few workers. It is, by far, the set-up that gives the highest rate of success that I'm aware of.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2023 17:11
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 14:20 |
|
|
Just buy red acetate sheets and put them over regular glass. Often found in hobby or art stores, or buy online. Should get more than you'll ever need for 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2023 07:53
|
|