Update 6-25-2015 Disaster!
Turns out my largest colony was up to about 300 workers, but now probably has no more than 70. A lot of the brood is now gone too. I'll explain what happened.
First of all, two of the colonies were starting to outgrow their current formicarium, obviously one of them being the colony with what was 300 or so workers. I decided to update the design of these formicariums entirely, instead of just creating a larger one very similar to the original.
This new design is completely configurable and expandable, and I think will work very well. You can read about it here (
http://www.formicult...ated-6-25-2015/).
The disaster happened when I forcefully moved my largest colony into it. I saw this same thing happen before when forcefully moving my
Acromyrmex colonies, but on a very small scale. Basically, I think what happened was the colony thought they were under attack, and just started fighting, not having any idea WHO they were fighting. They were fighting themselves, literally ripping each other to pieces.
When I first moved them in a few days ago, everything seemed fine. Shortly after, they started moving some of the brood into the out world, which I assumed was because of the humidity. I had the nest sitting right in front of an open window at night, and the containers were really starting to fog up. This made me decide to change the configuration a bit, and add another dry container between the out world and the fungus chambers, so they would have a place to go to escape the extreme humidity instead of just the out world.
Here the container at the end of the out world is not hydrated, while the one next to it, and the one next to that one are. Those three are also the only ones open. The last two are closed and not being used.
I added lots of new substrate.
A lot of the workers gathered on one of the out world walls and just kind of hung out there.
Then the fighting started.
It seemed to only be the older workers that were doing most of the fighting, while the younger callow workers and the queen stayed in the center of the fungus with most of the brood. I couldn't see the queen for three days, and was worried that she might have been ripped to pieces too. It turns out the entire time she was there, right in the middle of a big clump of workers. They were all completely covering her up.
They fought and fought, ripping off limbs, gasters and heads. Pretty soon the entire fungus container was littered with body parts.
It was a pretty horrific scene. I would guess they lost about 3/4 of the colony by the time the war was over.
This is what a lot of the survivors looked like once the fighting was done. This one is actually pretty lucky compared to some.
This one was not so lucky.
Three days later, almost all of the fighting stopped, and the remaining colony started cleaning up the mess, moving most of the carnage away from the fungus.
It's been four days now, and it looks like the workers have piled most all of it up in the corners. Hopefully they will eventually move it out of that container and into the out world where it won't grow unwanted fungus.
This will be the last time I try to forcefully move these things; It just doesn't work well. Maybe they are just too stupid or something, I don't know... This was my largest colony, but not anymore. I'm just glad the queen is okay, because she clearly produces a lot, and will probably have this colony back on its feet in no time.
As for the formicarium, I'm not worried about it. I don't see any reason to believe the formicarium itself had anything to do with this.