50 replies to this topic

[ponerinecat]

No problem. I am glad that you can still keep ants, as everyone on here should. Also, an herbivore recomedation: guinea pigs. They are super funny, and talkative.

I have a cat.He likes playing with mice. Probably not a good fit.

[NickAnter]

No problem. I am glad that you can still keep ants, as everyone on here should. Also, an herbivore recomedation: guinea pigs. They are super funny, and talkative.

I have a cat.He likes playing with mice. Probably not a good fit.

Haha, probably not.

[ForestDragon]

 

Very fascinating posts here. All niche hobbies follow this arc I guess. It reminds me a lot of how skateboarding went from an underground activity to really blowing up in the late ‘90s.
Things will really change for ant keeping now thst folks can just Google and find Pogonomyrmex queens for sale.

I wouldn't expect antkeeping to blow up into the next mainstream thing. It'll still be a niche hobby within a niche hobby (terraristics).

Antkeeping has been around for decades in Europe (in fact the Antstore is over 20 years old and people were keeping ants even before it opened) and it still doesn't even play a minor role in the terraristics economy.

Seeing anything antkeeping-related on a any terraristics convention (where they sell tons of lizards, geckos, tarantulas, etc.) is still a huge exception.
 

 

 

I've been doing ant things in real life and on the internet since the very late 90's, and only really got active online around 2003.  Antdude's Ant Farm Message Board was around for quite a few years by that point; I think it originated in the 90s but I don't know for sure. It was populated by some really smart people and actual Myrmecologists so if you did a decent job asking your question you could get some high quality answers.
 
Dermy's post largely covers a lot of the North American online ant stuff but it should be noted that there were actually a lot of really cool ant keeping websites up around the year 2000 or so with tutorials on how to build various kinds of formicariums.A lot of cool looking setups constructed primarily out of laboratory glassware that you don't see anymore because methods have developed beyond that, and its now not just scientists who are interested in keeping ants. There was even a website where someone was selling dyed plaster nests, wood frame nests, etc with a live webcam of a Camponotus colony. This person had all of their stuff for sale but I remember it being far more expensive than a lot of stuff available today. Around 2004 or so I remember visiting the German Ant Store website and they had a lot of really cool stuff. Their forums also had way more advanced setups than anything I've seen in the English speaking ant world until very recent years. The English speaking ant community was hilariously behind things being done in Europe and as far as I know may still be. 
 
But like a lot of the "early" internet, just about all of that old stuff is gone. It's been replaced by facebook groups, discords, and forums/blogs connected to companies selling ant keeping things.

Yeah and what's funny know is even forums and facebook are starting to get overthrown too.

 

How so? By what?

 

Facebook is actively purging petkeeping groups (even the large ones with 50k+ members) in their effort to crack down on live pet sales (which are forbidden in Facebook's ToS) - although it has to be said that the Facebook antkeeping groups brought this onto themselves considering how most group admins and staff gave less than a crap about the buckets of ants being illegally sold through their groups. It's a pretty well known thing that many FB antkeeping groups are little more than illegal trading hubs for exotic ants.
 
Forums are slowly getting replaced by more interactive platforms like Discord and other social media clients, which also is partially the forums' own faults. There are things that chat platforms like Discord just can't do and there are things that forums just can't do - both of them working in tandem would make for an amazing experience as they complement each other perfectly but nobody has tried this so far, in fact most forum communities are either completely ignorant or openly hostile towards these new platforms and the possibilities they bring with them.

 

Well the Ohio group discord and forum have worked in tandem and it works well we get people asking questions on the forum and people asking questions in the discord that can't be answered on the forum due to the need for discussion and it works well

[Mercutia]

 

Forums are slowly getting replaced by more interactive platforms like Discord and other social media clients, which also is partially the forums' own faults. There are things that chat platforms like Discord just can't do and there are things that forums just can't do - both of them working in tandem would make for an amazing experience as they complement each other perfectly but nobody has tried this so far, in fact most forum communities are either completely ignorant or openly hostile towards these new platforms and the possibilities they bring with them.

 

 

It's funny you should say this. The forum on Yuku which was the major ant keeping forum for some time HAD a chat room feature that was very unusual for forums for its time. It might not have as much functionality as Discord, but it allowed users to enter the room and have discussions about ants. It wasn't mobile friendly though, however at that time, smartphones weren't so much a thing (I'm dating myself for saying this xD). It was actually how people like Dermy, Drew, Miller, and various others were able to develop better relationships by discussing all sorts of ant related and non ant related topics there. When Drew decided to create his own forum, we knew it was one of the key features we wanted to bring here to Formiculture since it was so beneficial in creating relationships within the community. Granted, the technology is far more dated than something like Discord, I think it serves it's purpose quite well. 

[ANTdrew]

Does anyone know who invented the test tube set up? That seems to be a pivotal moment in ant keeping history.

[Antennal_Scrobe]

Does anyone know who invented the test tube set up? That seems to be a pivotal moment in ant keeping history.

Can any of you longtime antkeepers remember when you first saw one? Now I need to know.

[Mercutia]

Does anyone know who invented the test tube set up? That seems to be a pivotal moment in ant keeping history.

Can any of you longtime antkeepers remember when you first saw one? Now I need to know.

It was already popularized before my time but someone who helped perpetuate it was AntsCanada when he made all sorts of tutorial videos for catching and keeping queens. At least, that’s where I learned of it.

[OhNoNotAgain]

So sorta answering the original question. I was interested in ants starting in the 70's. I think it was in the 1980's that I got an interesting little formicarium from a Japanese kids' magazine. (Japanese kids' magazines bundle along some kind of toy to boost sales.) It was a cool, colorful device that resembled, in part, a cylinder within a cylinder, except that it had cutaways so it was essentially two-legged with two nesting areas, and a flat round foraging area on the top. I think the whole top could come off but there was also an extension on the top for feeding. If I do an internet search today, I don't find anything like it any more. A search on Japan Amazon shows a bunch of formicaria basically similar to what's available over here, including those gel things. (Japan has an insect-pet-keeping tradition going a long way back to captive beetles and crickets in cages.)

 

I also eventually got an Uncle Milton's ant farm.

 

Several times over the 1980's I found local queens (Midwestern US)  and got them to the point of having a small colony, whether in the little formicarium or the ant farm. Inevitably I would kill the colony through ignorance or neglect. The internet is an incredible resource that I wish I'd had back then.

 

Test tube queens were unknown to me back then.

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, August 23 2019 - 8:19 PM.

[Serafine]

Well the Ohio group discord and forum have worked in tandem and it works well we get people asking questions on the forum and people asking questions in the discord that can't be answered on the forum due to the need for discussion and it works well

That's nice. Unfortantely the larger forums are just sitting on their old technology, probably until their time is over.
 

It's funny you should say this. The forum on Yuku which was the major ant keeping forum for some time HAD a chat room feature that was very unusual for forums for its time. It might not have as much functionality as Discord, but it allowed users to enter the room and have discussions about ants. It wasn't mobile friendly though, however at that time, smartphones weren't so much a thing (I'm dating myself for saying this xD). It was actually how people like Dermy, Drew, Miller, and various others were able to develop better relationships by discussing all sorts of ant related and non ant related topics there. When Drew decided to create his own forum, we knew it was one of the key features we wanted to bring here to Formiculture since it was so beneficial in creating relationships within the community. Granted, the technology is far more dated than something like Discord, I think it serves it's purpose quite well.

Discord is vastly superior to the chat client FC has. I still don't understand why larger forums seem so opposed to implementing new features. You can clearly see what happens if you don't move with technological development in the german Ameisenforum which has lost around 70% of it's traffic over the last 2 years. A lot of people nowadays rather post their journals on Discord (where nobody can find them because Google doesn't know the exist and where they can vanish in a second due to someone programming a bot that deletes the respecive channels as Discord has zero backup features) than on a forum which is a really really bad sign.

[ConcordAntman]

Does anyone know who invented the test tube set up? That seems to be a pivotal moment in ant keeping history.

I found the test tube setup described in Hölldobler & Wilson’s The Ants (1990), chapter 20 Collecting, Culturing, Observing, p. 631, along with ways to construct simple outworlds. I’d bet it’s an old myrmecology technique. These guys had been at it since they were kids in the 1940’s!

[AntHUB]

Around 2017-2018 I had a few colonies but nothing major, I got a few founding colonies of Camponotus, Formica, Lasius and a few Myrmica colonies, but that was about it, I was still very interested in the Ants, but my focus shifted to watching Flights of which I could almost pin-point the exact date of some species (Camponotus esp.) So for anyone who is new, it might take a bit, but I bet in a few years time you too can memorize the time for each species you want so you can be out there to get them during the flights, esp. watching them fly from their nests, if you can because that's one of the best experiences of Anting/Hobby Ant keeping you can get, my passion for "Keeping" ants may have died but I still do enjoy an ant flight or tI

If you have a lot of free time memorizing the flights only takes about 2-5 years per (1-5 sq. mi) location (assuming you have a rough idea of all colonies).

 

The factors that help expedite this process are as follows:

map out all colonies in your area (inaturalist works great for this) or at least have a fairly accurate rendition of where they are. This can take 2 months or more depending on the location

Start recording date of NF observations

Black light for queens

Go out and collect queens as often as you can (day and night, I like to go collect while the black light runs)

keep track of everything you can when you find a queen, wind speed & direction, weather, soil quality, humidity, temp. etc... (that way you plot where the majority of queens will land).

Look at Nuptial flight calendars and use these as an example, HOWEVER, some areas are vastly different than others, for example:

mymecosystus mendax is reported as flying in july, but in colorado it flies twice, during june (june 21-23rd usually), and during august (august 18-24th)

 

That being said if you have connections with ant keepers in your area, you can get a better picture of the nuptial flights in your area. and if your schedules differ you can both search during different times.