46 replies to this topic

[ANTdrew]

Dang! Yeah, those magnets can have a mind of their own.

[TennesseeAnts]

Neodymium, I believe.

[RushmoreAnts]

Some people hate the sight of blood and open flesh wounds. Others repulse at earthworms. I hate maggots and roundworms. Period. Nothing else. KEEP THEM AWAY. 

[OhNoNotAgain]

I just finished the fifth and last lecture and left the ant farm at the school for the kids. The kids really seemed to enjoy learning about ants and were excited to see the colonies I brought in (the huge C. sansabeanus queen was definitely the biggest hit). I just feel bad about one kid who missed the presentation and looked so sad. Aside from the Uncle Milton booklet does anyone have recommendations for good ant books for grades 2-3?

[OhNoNotAgain]

I drove back to show ants to those kids over lunch.... Can’t leave kids disappointed. Lol

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, January 28 2020 - 12:45 PM.

[RushmoreAnts]

It's so nice to see kids appreciating nature. If only every school would do this.....

[OhNoNotAgain]

It's so nice to see kids appreciating nature. If only every school would do this.....

It WAS really nice! I was kinda surprised by how intrigued they were. I think putting together a series of PPT slides with great photos from Alex Wild and dspdrew helped - I used a lot of humor and even some mystery ("How do weaver ants glue their leaves together?" Which I answered a few minutes later when covering larvae, and I phrased it as ants using their babies like glue sticks  ). Also making sure to elicit "ewwww"s like mentioning that people eat ants (with a PSA about not eating raw bugs). Kids love hearing gross things. And girls especially are thrilled when learning that even the majors are girls.   For boys who want kings I told them to look at termites. 

Highly rewarding and I managed it despite being something of a n00b at ants (though technically I do have a science degree). I encourage people here to consider educational outreach avenues, esp. as many of you know a ton more about your local ants than I do.

[justanotheramy]

Kids also like hearing about different ways the "kid ants" are important and useful members of the colony, and not just little parasites — providing silk, providing glue, helping digest food for adults, etc.
And teachers and parents really appreciate the cooperation and working together examples.

It's also possible to throw in a bit of history/critical thinking about language in an age appropriate way: we call them "queens" because at the time our culture started thinking about ant and bee societies and how they work, our own society was structured using feudalism, so we projected that. But social insects are essentially matriarchal families with a flat cooperative structure not a vertical hierarchy, so that projection is misleading. One of the languages at my daughter's school is Pitjantjatjara, a First Nations language from central Australia, so I'm talking to the Pitjantjatjara teacher who's talking to people in community to try to find out what they call the big ant, and how they conceptualise the relationships between the ants.

[OhNoNotAgain]

I thought about discussing "queen" as it means to ants as opposed to human rulers, but the talk was already super long so I didn't really get into it. I mean the kids were young enough that I called it "ant wedding in the sky" (didn't use the word "mate" because really, most kids that age don't know what it means) and I didn't mention what happens to the male alates ("princes") afterward unless someone asked... lol. If I were addressing older kids I would probably have gone into more of that level of thing.

 

The school is also multilingual and I do happen to know that queen ant is also "queen ant" in at least one of the languages so it wasn't a good launching point from that perspective. lol

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, January 29 2020 - 2:59 PM.

[justanotheramy]

Yeah, I think you'd have to dig into Indigenous or pre-colonial knowledge systems to find stories about ant societies that didn't call queens "queens", but it'd be an interesting research project.
(The Pitjantjatjara use the same word for tourists as for ants, by the way: minga.)

In Australia you can say "mating flight" and "fertilise the eggs" and early years kids know in a general David Attenborough kind of way what that means and nobody gets their knickers in a twist — but Americans seem a bit weird about this stuff so IDK?

[OhNoNotAgain]

Yeah, I think you'd have to dig into Indigenous or pre-colonial knowledge systems to find stories about ant societies that didn't call queens "queens", but it'd be an interesting research project.
(The Pitjantjatjara use the same word for tourists as for ants, by the way: minga.)

In Australia you can say "mating flight" and "fertilise the eggs" and early years kids know in a general David Attenborough kind of way what that means and nobody gets their knickers in a twist — but Americans seem a bit weird about this stuff so IDK?

 

Haha let's just say I have a general sense of what they know/don't know and I didn't want to be the one to be giving them their first "talk" about the birds and the bees via the ants.

Because one of them would be SURE to ask.

 

Some other things:

 

4 out of 5 classes, someone mentioned ants invading the bathtub (yes, Argentine territory here). Not kitchen... bathtub. Kinda weird.

While the majority of kids knew what queen ants were in a vague sense, there were still kids who didn't know, so it was worth talking about.

Kids do learn from nature shows and films! There was the repeated question of "Are there INFINITY(sic) ants?" in one class that studied a mathematician and had watched a film about him, and some kids referenced a science museum film that covered yellow crazy ants. And yeah, one of them did already know how weaver ants "glue" their nests together, thanks to watching some show. People out there into ants/Nature/whatever and videos should do your best AntsCanada-style trailblazing!

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, January 29 2020 - 8:01 PM.

[justanotheramy]

So many kids movies and shows have male workers, and it makes me so mad.
Like, if you're that certain that people won't watch a film about women, make your movie about termites (who doesn't love social cockroaches!!), don't lie to kids about insects.

We've had Agentine ants in Australia since 1941. It's entirely possible that's what I've got in my orphan colony? 
I had ants build a nest in the motor of my microwave once — and yeah, a trail that made its way across the walls of 2 rooms to get to the bathtub 

[OhNoNotAgain]

So many kids movies and shows have male workers, and it makes me so mad.
Like, if you're that certain that people won't watch a film about women, make your movie about termites (who doesn't love social cockroaches!!), don't lie to kids about insects.

We've had Agentine ants in Australia since 1941. It's entirely possible that's what I've got in my orphan colony? 
I had ants build a nest in the motor of my microwave once — and yeah, a trail that made its way across the walls of 2 rooms to get to the bathtub 

 

Oh you mean like Bug's Life? I sat there ticked off the whole movie. And others like it.

I mean I get that kids' fiction bugs need to have excellent human-level vision and be able to talk verbally and essentially teach good human ethics and so on, but I'd think that other aspects of invertebrate life would be really interesting in a fictitious setting. I'm even thinking of taking a stab at it myself 

 

Haha what is it about bathtubs... and Argentine ants. 

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, January 29 2020 - 9:23 PM.

[justanotheramy]

Bug's Life, Ants… there's a long list of stuff my kid is not allowed to watch because it's sexist trash: basically it's harder to find kid content without male workers — because they work, right? So they must be dudes. 

[OhNoNotAgain]

Yup, like I said, it was fun watching the reactions when kids realized even the big mean-looking soldiers are girls. 

(Off-topic rant: Someone should have told J R R Tolkien that female eagles are bigger and more dominant than the males.   )

OTOH a dad I talked with joked that he would've lost interest in ants at the point of hearing about the reality of male ants....   But really, I just want all kids to develop an interest in and respect for the natural world.   There's something interesting for everyone!

[RushmoreAnts]

Bug's Life

I feed grasshoppers to my ants, lol.  (They're just a little hard to crush. They keep on moving, and I have to smash their heads and pull their legs off.....  )

[justanotheramy]

(Off-topic rant: Someone should have told J R R Tolkien that female eagles are bigger and more dominant than the males.   )

 

And sharks!

 

OTOH a dad I talked with joked that he would've lost interest in ants at the point of hearing about the reality of male ants....   But really, I just want all kids to develop an interest in and respect for the natural world.   There's something interesting for everyone!

Something I talked about with the kids last year was how in an ant colony everyone looks after each other, and everyone has something they can do to contribute.
i.e.:

Okay, so the "boy ants" need help eating. But they help out when they can — if you watch a nest entrance on a sunny morning in cold weather you'll often see lots and lots of "boy ants" out in the sun running around really fast for a while and then going back inside. That's them turning themselves into hot water bottles to make the nest cozy for their mum and all their sisters… There's always something that everyone can do to help out.
(etc)

Edited by justanotheramy, January 30 2020 - 6:14 PM.

[ponerinecat]

Hey now, no sexism. Male ants are useful. Great food.

[OhNoNotAgain]

I wrote this up in reply to someone. Just in case anyone is thinking of talking to kids maybe between Kindergarten and 3rd grade:

 

Kids seemed to like these sorts of factoids:

- ants put out trash (used a dspdrew photo)

- ants taking care of aphids (I jokingly called them "cows" all the time)

- ants cutting leaves to feed the fungus (I had to explain about mushrooms and fungus)

- weaver ants work together to glue leaves together (cliffhanger of how they do it - larvae as "glue sticks")

- ants fighting off elephants trying to eat acacia trees, and the trees reward the ants

- army ants eating stuff

- how ants fight

- Argentines have hundreds of queens and the true story I found online of how they kept going into a freezer until there was a huge ball of frozen ants ("ewwww!")

- big soldiers are girls

- this major has a door for a head!

- stories of individual ants/colonies, like my stories about my Mean Queen (C. sansabeanus)

 

I made a PowerPoint and I used tons of photos from Alex Wild, https://www.alexanderwild.com (he has a free educational license but you can't upload to the internet or use them for anything else), and he has so many cool photos, like of leafcutters, fungal gardens, queen ants carrying a "starter kit," ant nuptial flight ("big ant wedding in the sky"), piles of brood ... plus some photos of majors biting through skin (kids LOVE gross stuff) ... the photos really made everything come together. I added funny text like ants saying "I need a fresh baby to patch this hole!" or "yummy mushroom flavor!" or "OUCH" and stuff to keep the kids laughing and engaged. 

 

I also used an Uncle Milton ant poster to talk about ant anatomy, two stomachs ("when a hungry ant comes along, the ant can share her food by going BLEAGHH" Response: "ewwwww!"), stinger location, and "we call this the gaster and not ANT BUTT" (laughter).

 

I took in:

- Uncle Milton ant farm with Pogonomyrmex workers (left it at the school for kids to observe)

- Camponotus fragilis (excellent because of their large cocoons and big, pretty ants)

- Tetramorium (annoying because they didn't like the flashlights and built a sand mountain to block the view of their brood, but they are a good contrast to fragilis)

- Veromessor pergandei in a test tube in a mini outworld

- Camponotus sansabeanus (very small colony BUT the queen is HUGE and I could tell stories about the Mean Queen)

 

Remember what got you intrigued about ants ... and that kids love gross and cool things and crazy stories ... that's basically the key.

[OhNoNotAgain]

And a quick update on the Uncle Milton set up I left at school. I went in today to water them, give them a bit of grape and a few dandelion seeds (just cuz I'm curious):

 

 

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