I was urged to try some Cataglyphis by few Discord folks for a while and I decided to order some as my friend was ordering ants from a retailer anyway, so I sneaked a colony in his order. I've decided to get C. rosenhaueri out of 4 species listed for sale. This particular species is on a small side of Cataglyphis and exhibits weaker polymorphism than more known species like C. nodus, but they have beautiful colour, reminding me of Camponotus lateralis.
The colony was offered as having 20-30 workers. These ants are obviously dug up so I expected some deaths. My friend removed unknown amount of workers which died in transit to him, fed them and shipped them to me. They arrived at 2023.07.12 with 13 workers and a small batch of eggs. This means that 1/3 to 1/2 of the colony died in transport, but the small batch of eggs was promising. They appeared to be well fed, I guess by my friend, not the seller.
The queen with her butt getting chomped cleaned:
Some repletes:
The brood they came with:
Soon after arrival two workers dropped dead and the colony was showing signs of stress, the queen was sometimes going out of the tube and wandering in the outworld, workers seemed to run in circles at high speeds like they were lost. But the colony was ready to grow, the batch of eggs they came with was growing and on 2023.07.21 I've noticed first larvae. 10 days later, on 2023.07.31, a first pupa was present in the nest, but also two more workers died in the meantime, so the number is down to 9. Two days later I've checked them and the number of pupae is up to 6! Perhaps from the 6 eggs they came with. And there is some healthy further brood. This is a sign that even though the original workers are dying out of old age or travel related stress, the replacement should come in time and the colony should bounce back and become stable. The queen stopped going out of their tube and no workers are running in circles around the outworld, so I think they have finally learned where they are and what is the nest part - these ants are very vision oriented, they use sight to navigate the terrain, so perhaps they were just confused as this outworld is clearly not what they remembered from nature.
Few words about the ants and how I keep them:
As all Cataglyphis these ants are adapted to extreme heat conditions, foraging in the hottest time of the day to avoid competition from less adapted species. According to papers I found their peak activity occurs when the surface temperature reaches 44°C, and they can survive even higher, up to 50°C. To emulate this I am using a 10 W halogen lamp shining at the outworld from small distance, which raises the surface temperature directly below it to 40°C for 8 hours a day. These ants have a biological clock and will hide to the nest before the light goes off, in nature they realise that after some time the temperature will start dropping and competition is going to come out of their nests, so they hide before that happens and block the entrance with pebbles. The nest gets heated up to 30°C during the day and goes down to room temperature (22-24°C) at nights - preferably it should be more stable and in between these values, but they seem to be fine with it.
In nature a huge part of their diet are other ants. In captivity I can confirm that they not only use them as a food source, but actually prefer them - I am offering them tiny red runners and Camponotus fallax alates (sourced from my colony) and they only take the alates, leaving the red runners to dry out.
They are bad climbers. Any barrier should work, perhaps no barrier, just an upside down rim would work, but I use the same oil I use against all my other ants. Due to bad climbing skills a test tube is not the greatest nest for them, so I offered them a test tube with some plaster poured on the floor, but they found it, one worker spent one night in it and ignored it - they know better what they want so I am not interfering.
This is the way I keep them - light is pointing the far corner from the nest to not increase the nest temperature too much.
Edited by Kowal, June 9 2024 - 12:52 AM.
Answered
