79 replies to this topic

[Ants_Dakota]

I feel like they might be trying to cover up the stickiness. I have had ants do this before.

[ANTdrew]

That would be my assumption unless you actually observe live ants struggling in the nectar.

[TheAntGuy]

Oh man, hope that doesnt become a problem with the nectar, good luck and great journal!

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.3.12

Yesterday (?) I gave the ants some Gerber Chicken and Gravy baby food (chicken, water, cornstarch) as per someone else on the forum.

First problem is neither colony found it immediately so it got a little bit dry.

I think there was some interest, but not like with the Veromessor pergandei colony 1.

 

Next day I come in and as per thoughts above about covering up sticky (see pic)....

This is what T1 (in the mini-hearth) had done to their little dish of chicken baby food.

I was hoping they'd used up all their sand reserves, but no. They still have a mountain of sand on their water tower.

 

I pulled the feeder dishes out and will try again someday.

 

Today I gave everyone some shrimp bits. I just shoved them into the nests and didn't really track what happened after that (I know they liked freshly cooked Costco shrimp last time - defrosted shrimp not so much). I did see single ants hanging out at the shrimp.

 

Oh and there was more sand against the mini-hearth window... had to spend some time sliding the glass up to drop most of it.

SOMEDAY the mini-hearth will run out of sand. Someday....

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Edited by OhNoNotAgain, March 12 2020 - 8:28 PM.

[ANTdrew]

Man, my mini-colony won’t move into the test tubes. I’ve never had a Tetra colony show stubborness like this! I even removed the glass of the mini-hearth, exposed them to light, and am blowing on them with a straw periodically.

Do you cover your Tetras’ glass? I bet they’d put less sand if they were normally dark anyways.

[OhNoNotAgain]

Man, my mini-colony won’t move into the test tubes. I’ve never had a Tetra colony show stubborness like this! I even removed the glass of the mini-hearth, exposed them to light, and am blowing on them with a straw periodically.

Do you cover your Tetras’ glass? I bet they’d put less sand if they were normally dark anyways.

Yeah the sand mountain didn't exist actually UNTIL I took them into the school and kids were using flashlights to look into the mini-hearth. Between the first lecture and the fourth of the first day, they built up most of it. I think it was the flashlights.

 

As for the sand falling next to the glass, I'm not sure what's up with that. I wonder if they are doing it to try to plug a microscopic air leak?? I don't know....

 

For moving my fraggles I got a camping lantern and put it RIGHT up next to the glass on brightest mode, plus the new mini-hearth was on heat and the old one wasn't. That got them to move very quickly. But Tetramorium ... yeah I think they can be stubborn.

[ANTdrew]

I finally got my Tetras to move out of their mini-hearth. They’re split between two test tubes now in a foraging container, and they have a crap ton of brood!

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.3.25

 

As noted elsewhere, I am overrun with supposed blue bottle fly larve-turned-fly. They are big ugly hairy black flies. I dropped a whole one into Tetra2's outworld and stuffed part of one (about 1/3 of a fly) down into Tetra1's nest.

 

The workers are SWARMING the fly corpses. In Tetra1 (right photo) you can see they are bringing larvae to the fly piece.

 

 

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[ANTdrew]

Excellent. They’re going to grow like crazy eating those flies.

[RushmoreAnts]

Maybe I’m really too paranoid about this, but those lighter workers look surprisingly similar to tsushimae.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.4.18

 

So I had a massive fruit fly boom, and I've been feeding excess to various ant colonies. I didn't have to teach Tetramorium to hunt ants. Unlike C. fragilis and the late deceased Vero2 colony, they just simply figured it out.

 

Here're updates on the two Tetra colonies.

 

Tetra1: As per the movie 2001: "My God, it's full of stars ants!" Last time I counted I estimated over 100. Now it must be approaching 200 or more.

 

 

Solid black mat of Tetramorium all over the back of the nest....

 

Tetra 2: It's interesting to see how they use the space in their rather different style of formicarium. They used to just hang out in two little chambers. Now they seem to have devoted a couple chambers to dead fruit flies. Because they've started putting their trash into the outworld, I'm GUESSING these are food storage and not just trash.

 

 

I dunno. We'll see. I did accidentally dump a TON of living fruit flies into their outworld so they won't be lacking protein any time soon. I do, however, have to refill their sugar water. Somehow. Without a zillion fruit flies escaping.

 

 

 

 

[NickAnter]

The ones in the mini-hearth look like they have about 350 workers to me. I just counted a group of fifty, and saw how many times that fits in, and it is about 7.

[RushmoreAnts]

The more you feed them, the faster they’ll grow.

[OhNoNotAgain]

5/4/2020

"Bloodworm SOUP? Who needs SOUP? We'll eat plain old dry bloodworms."

Actually all my remaining colonies EXCEPT for C. sansabeanus are busy hauling in dried bloodworms.

 

Tetra1 in the mini-hearth is getting seriously scary. The back wall of the mini hearth is absolutely plastered with ants. The outworld is populated with ants trying to escape up the corners. The front of the nest is crawling with ants. I really, really need to get them a larger formicarium.

 

I'm going to take Tetramorium off high heat. Today I put them both on the same seedling heating mat and turned the thermostat down 5 degrees F. In fact I'll probably turn off their heat entirely for the summer. I really do not need a million Tetramorium.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.5.24

First off, I've been preparing to trade away Tetra2 (the ones who were misrepresented to me as being Veromessor).

 

I set a red-covered test tube connected by tubing to the formicarium. I took out the formicarium water reservoir so the humidity/water would go away (this is how I killed half the colony by accident previously). Then I had to wait ... for WEEKS ... until the ants finally decided to move to the test tube a few days ago.

 

Even though they lost so many in that dehydration accident a while back, a quick count and I think I have well over 100 workers, most crammed into the tube, with some still in the old formicarium.

 

 

But what to feed them? I ran out of fruit flies because I had a massive mite infestation appear and had to freeze the lot. I fed the Tetras some reheated lamb and shrimp, which they liked, but then was kind of stumped as to what to feed. As mentioned in other journals, I couldn't bring myself to kill cute young dubias, plus I'm low on mealworms.

 

On the other hand, I just got a new shipment of fly maggots for my jumping spiders. My old baggie of fly spikes had mostly pupated in the fridge while I was waiting for the spiders to get big enough to eat them. (The two spiders finally got big enough to eat them, but they each ate ONE larva and got so full they both molted. I guess not surprising given the spiders were 1/3 the size of the larvae.... But after molting, which takes a week, the spiders ate just TWO larvae each, and then were so full they have decided they are going to molt again! Ugh. So that leaves me with dozens of uneaten fly pupae that are getting too old in the fridge.)

 

A day or two ago I fed the somewhat neglected Tetra2 colony a cut up fly larva. They carted the pieces half way down the tube before the pieces desiccated and the ants abandoned them. The old baggie of fly spikes has almost no larvae left - the rest all pupated. Fly pupae look like oblong brown capsules, made of tough "plastic" (I mean it's not plastic, but it's really thick and tough).

 

So I started culling old fly pupae. Previously I would just puncture the pupae, get grossed out by the ooze coming out, and then just give the oozing capsules to the ants. Today I decided fly pupae are definitely much more accessible to ants if you circumnavigate the pupal cylinder and pry off half the tough membrane. It either leaves an oozing puddle of yuck, or it exposes a partially developed fly pupa. Next time I do this (I still have loads of fly pupae) I will take the capsule off completely if there's a physical pupa inside. I'll only leave half the capsule on if there's only ooze inside.

 

Tetra1 also got a pile of the pupae and I spilled some of the ooze into their feeding dish. Tetra1 drank it up eagerly.

 

I've also taken a bunch of pupae out to see how many eclose into those big black hairy flies. Tetras love those things even more. I just hate dealing with adult flies because they ... fly. Fishing out big buzzing black flies and killing them before they can fly around the house and freak out everyone else is not fun.

 

ADDENDUM: I'm going to update the first journal entry with general notes about my Tetra colonies.

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, May 24 2020 - 12:33 AM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.06.02

I traded away Tetra2. They arrived safely at their destination despite being crammed into that test tube.

 

Tetra1 I am trying to move out of their mini-hearth and into the plastic AntWorldUSA formicarium, which I rinsed with water. I've connected the two formicaria with about 4 feet of tubing (2 foot tube + different size 2 foot tube) that has a fairly steep incline, but I think they are able to go up and down the slope (with some difficulty).

(AntWorldUSA seems have returned, by the way. They are again selling and stuff.)

 

I think the colony is well-established enough that I don't need to heat them much any more. Anyway I don't know what to do if they increase to like 1000, and they will be running over their Fluon barrier in no time probably.

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, June 2 2020 - 7:19 PM.

[ANTdrew]

In my experience, Tetramorium are entirely incapable of scaling fluon if it’s not too humid and properly applied. That’s one of the big selling points of the species.

[OhNoNotAgain]

So back on about 

 

2020.6.7

Tetra1 moved into the AntWorldUSA formicarium, finally.

 

And then around 2020.6.10 or 11 I forcibly moved the last stragglers out of the mini-hearth with a paintbrush.

 

Photo from 2020.6.7

They fill up about double the space of how much Tetra2 did at the end (probably because Tetra2 was started later and had the catastrophic dehydration event). So I'm guessing 200+ ants.

 

Feeding them fly pupae at least once a week currently.

 

 

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.10.8

 

Tetra 1 is still in the same formicarium. But they have blown through the Fluon, of course.

They are so small they get out of the tiniest cracks.

Today they were discovered all over the dining room table.

They found something they were really interested in: namely, a dead honeypot queen I'd left on the table....

Oh well, photo opp!! 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, October 8 2020 - 5:32 PM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.10.16

 

"Attack on Titan"

Some people on the big Antkeeping Discord introduced me to the Japanese anime "Attack on Titan." The actual Japanese is likely more accurately "Charge of (the) Titan(s)/Giant(s)" （進撃の巨人）but the English title is more appropriate right now. Because that's what happened. And just like in the anime season 1 anyway, little tiny things attacking big giant things who outnumber them = squish.

 

YES SILLY TETRAMORIUM ESCAPED AGAIN. (They are too darn small.)

I found them all over the ant shelves, and naturally they had fallen into the Camponotus starter colonies' tubs, all of which have no lids.

I found some dead already, but IRONICALLY the place there were the most dead was the PRENOLEPIS bin. Mind you, the Prenolepis are weak, low in number, have no brood, and are for all intents and purposes a failing colony, but they are MIGHTY WINTER ANTS who can decimate Argentine ants, and apparently also Tetramorium. Sadly I missed that battle. Presumably it was merely a matter of "intruder alert! spray!" and done.

 

From here I'm just going to include pictures of some hapless Tetras invading the test tube of my largest ants, the Quercicolas.

Some things I saw: 

A cola worker with a dead(?) Tetra stuck to her leg.

Colas act like scaredy cats when attacking Tetra. Pounce, chomp, jump back in a panic because those tiny ants could explode (or apparently that's what they believe).

Below, you'll see a photo of where the Tetra, even after being attacked by a cola inside the cola tube, went merrily on her way and PICKED UP SOME FOOD in the middle of the test tube. Surrounded by hostile ants, the Tetramorium natural gluttony instinct still holds strong. You can see the aftermath.

Anyway first photo is of a Tetramorium cruising by in the foreground, while in the back you can see the behemoth titan-like cola queen and her workers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, October 16 2020 - 3:26 PM.