34 replies to this topic

[Aaron567]

June 21, 2018

 

The first smithi worker has just eclosed.

 

 

 

This is a full-sized bureni worker (left) compared with the smithi worker (right). 

 

 

 

This is a comparison of a tiny nanitic-sized bureni worker and a full-sized bureni worker. This shows just how much this species varies depending on the age of the colony. The nanitic worker is from my current founding bureni queens.

 

 

 

This is a bad picture, but you can see the smithi worker next to a nanitic bureni. D. smithi has a bigger and broader head. 

 

 

 

The bad news is that this is the only smithi worker and will be the only one for a while. I am still seeing no other smithi larvae. A couple weeks ago I collected lots of D. bureni queens and split all of them into two test tubes so they can found together. Both groups currently have larvae. When they have pupae, I will take a lot of the pupae from these bureni founding groups and give them to the parasitic colony. The parasitic colony will have a lot of workers when the pupae hatch, so I am hoping that they will stop eating their eggs when they have so many workers. 

 

One of the bureni queen groups' larvae pile. 

 

[Aaron567]

July 17, 2018

 

A couple weeks ago I gave this parasitic colony a lot of pupae and larvae from the D. bureni queens in the last post. The colony now has 50+ bureni (host) workers and will be getting more. Sadly, it seems like the colony's only smithi worker was killed by the bureni nanitics that have overrun the colony. I am not really surprised, however. From now on I have decided I will just treat this colony as if they aren't even parasitic and maybe I will begin to see some smithi workers emerging eventually. Now that the colony has this much host brood and workers, it is very similar to the conditions they would be exhibiting in the wild.

 

 

 

Obviously it is impossible to tell what brood is bureni and what is smithi. The colony has a good little batch of larvae now, so I would like to believe those are smithi, but it hasn't been long enough since the big brood boost to know for sure.

 

These photos are a bit crappy and hard to see.. but their test tube is getting dirty and is also sitting inside a sandy outworld now so the brood tends to blend in to the sand.

 

 

 

Photos from last week.

 

 

This is one of the full-sized bureni workers that used to be alive. She and the others were also killed by the nanitic-sized workers.

 

[Aaron567]

August 4, 2018

 

I think by now it is safe to assume that most, if not all of the brood by now is smithi brood, which is great. Strangely it looks like the host workers may have been fighting with each other because a lot of workers died in the past couple weeks.

 

Bad pictures but I think the pupae and pre-pupae are smithi, the parasitic ones. It is still slightly possible that they're just from the bureni eggs in the brood boost 1 month ago. 

 

 

 

If you look in the center of this picture, you can see a lot of eggs and several small larvae. Those are smithi without a doubt. 

 

 

 

So if the current pupae are not smithi, I am certain that I will have some smithi pupae very soon. They haven't been eating the eggs.

[Aaron567]

August 18, 2018

 

The first decent batch of smithi workers is finally starting to hatch. I can see multiple smithi workers with more on the way. But now the problem is that I don't see any eggs. 

 

The smithi worker is the brown one on the left in the first picture. She's a little larger than most of the bureni workers in the colony. All other workers in these pictures are just different sizes and color variations of bureni, depending on what they are fed as larvae. They range from dark brown to bright orange, and from 2 millimeters to 3.5mm.

 

 

 

It looks like there are about 50 workers now. They have a pretty big graveyard in the outworld because so many workers have died, likely from killing each other. Their old test tube is nearly completely dry so a lot of the colony has been hanging out in the new tube because they're getting ready to move. 

 

 

It's so hard to photograph inside their old test tube but here you can see kinda the brood they have at the moment. Not very much, but all of the brood is smithi. The queen just really needs to lay some more eggs before they completely run out of brood.

 

Edited by Aaron567, August 18 2018 - 10:19 AM.

[Aaron567]

December 28, 2018

 

Shortly after that last post, in August/September, the queen of this cool colony died after acting very slow and clumsy for several days. I think if she wouldn't have died I would've had a successful D. smithi colony because they were doing so well and were clearly about to have a smithi population boom. 

 

The only explanation for her death that I can think of is that she may have had mites. If you look at this picture of the first ever smithi worker they got, there are what looks like mites on the sides of her head. And because the worker was still callow at the time, I assume that they were probably parasitic rather than phoretic, taking advantage of her soft exoskeleton to feed off of her. Even though I wasn't able to find mites on the queen in any of the pictures, she still could've had them and gone unnoticed.

 

 

 

I look forward to finding more Dorymyrmex smithi queens in spring of 2019, and hopefully more than just one fertile one this time. I came so close on just my first attempt at founding an independent colony of this species.

[Aaron567]

March 16, 2020

 

Today I found a single dealate Dorymyrmex smithi queen at about 3:00 PM. She is the first one I have found since March of 2018 (the previous queen in this journal). I went out and dug up some host Dorymyrmex bureni larvae for her and she appears to have accepted them. The brood entirely consists of larvae, so it will be a while until host workers emerge. But, if she's anything like the last queen, she may lay eggs in just a few more days.

 

[Aaron567]

March 21, 2020

 

Just as I expected, the queen has laid her first eggs, only a few days after receiving host brood. There are four eggs total, and one of the host larvae is getting ready to pupate. She also decided to separate the extra grains of sand away from the brood, allowing me to remove it so everything can be seen more easily.

 

[Aaron567]

April 9, 2020

 

In the original host brood boost, there were only larvae (no pupae), because that is all I could find; the wild D. bureni here had just come out of diapause and did not appear to have pupae yet. Three host larvae successfully pupated, but the rest died... it appears that smithi queens do not feed the larvae but will still care for them otherwise. Having no worker presence, all larvae that were not quite large enough to pupate starved to death. One of the host pupae hatched into the first worker, but the worker died shortly after eclosing, for no apparent reason. One pupa eclosed today and the last one looks like it will eclose by tomorrow. All the dead larvae unfortunately caused a yellow fungus to form. Hopefully that won't be a big problem as I tried to clean as much of it up as possible.

 

The queen has laid a lot of eggs since the last update. Today it appears there are around 30. I think in one of the pictures you may even be able to see a tiny larva among them, but it is hard to tell. Learning from my last experience with these parasites, if I do not keep continuously boosting them with host brood, they will start to eat the smithi eggs and larvae. I plan on digging up more host brood tomorrow.

 

The large larva you can see in these pictures is the last remaining host larva, and it has just died.

 

[jtremain]

FYI, your original queen looks like D. flavus, not D. bureni. If you were digging up bureni brood to add to the flavus colony, this could explain some of the problems, especially with three species once there were smithi in there. There are seven species of Dorymyrmex in Florida and almost every bureni I've seen in online groups and forums are usually not bureni. Bureni gasters tend to be wider than the skinny flavus, and bureni have little to no dark brown or black on the tips of their gasters whereas the flavus usually have a very distinct darkening on the last third of their gasters and their heads above the eyes darken as they age whereas the bureni have little to no darkening at the head. I could of course be wrong, but your early pics are identical to my flavus colony. Here are two great pics of bureni and flavus:

 

Flavus - https://www.alexande...mex/i-tTgNzGb/A

 

Bureni - https://www.alexande...mex/i-kQNpZr7/A

 

My 10 month flavus colony has roughly 300-350 workers now. As the colony ages, the older flavus will start to markedly darken as the workers age. Although many people fail with Dorymyrmex's, they are actually amazingly easy once you learn their one secret, which is don't move them into a large formicarium until there are at 'least' 20 workers. Every Dorymyrmex queen I've tried to transfer out of a tube with 10 or less workers eventually fails within a month or two after transfer. The queens are extremely sensitive and somewhat fragile. My successful colony had about 25 workers when I placed the tube in an Ants Canada large Omni Nest. It took almost a week for the workers to decide to forcibly drag the queen out of the tube but once they did the colony quickly exploded.

 

Btw, I highly suggest to not use Tarheel Ants Mini Hearths for founding. They will grow and do very well until anything causes stress before 30-50 workers. The problem with the Mini Hearth and Dorymyrmex is that Dorymyrmex's like to keep their brood, especially larvae and pupae, on the lowest floor in the form. When a Mini Hearth is bumped and the water enters the nest it of course pools at the bottom killing the brood. The workers will panic and leave the most of the brood and to make it worse, the majority of the time this has happened under observation the queens will completely stop laying eggs and she will die off within a few weeks to a month leaving the workers to wait to die off. I lost several colonies this way and it wasn't until I put them in forms that did not have internal water dishes that they became successful. 

 

I love Dorymyrmex, no stinger, no formic acid, more times than not you don't even know you've been bit by one, usually not aggressive and 'once' established they increase in numbers very quickly if they have the space. They also love to hang out in the outworld and are pretty active 24/7. Also, since they are a Florida species, you can save yourself a lot of hassle by just turning off their heat for Florida winter months and just keep them at AC room temp. The room I keep mine in ranges from 70-73 F year round and when I turn off their heat cables they barely slow down and will store up a LOT of brood for spring time...a lot. I've seen no stress whatsoever by doing a 'Florida' style diapause in AC rooms. But of course, it can be 40 F outside and the Dorymyrmex species are still running around like it's summer, lol. 

 

Hopefully some of the above will be helpful for you. Let me know if you have any questions on my flavus.

Edited by jtremain, April 12 2020 - 11:15 AM.

[Aaron567]

FYI, your original queen looks like D. flavus, not D. bureni. If you were digging up bureni brood to add to the flavus colony, this could explain some of the problems, especially with three species once there were smithi in there. There are seven species of Dorymyrmex in Florida and almost every bureni I've seen in online groups and forums are usually not bureni. Bureni gasters tend to be wider than the skinny flavus, and bureni have little to no dark brown or black on the tips of their gasters whereas the flavus usually have a very distinct darkening on the last third of their gasters and their heads above the eyes darken as they age whereas the bureni have little to no darkening at the head. I could of course be wrong, but your early pics are identical to my flavus colony. Here are two great pics of bureni and flavus:

 

Flavus - https://www.alexande...mex/i-tTgNzGb/A

 

Bureni - https://www.alexande...mex/i-kQNpZr7/A

 

My 10 month flavus colony has roughly 300-350 workers now. As the colony ages, the older flavus will start to markedly darken as the workers age. Although many people fail with Dorymyrmex's, they are actually amazingly easy once you learn their one secret, which is don't move them into a large formicarium until there are at 'least' 20 workers. Every Dorymyrmex queen I've tried to transfer out of a tube with 10 or less workers eventually fails within a month or two after transfer. The queens are extremely sensitive and somewhat fragile. My successful colony had about 25 workers when I placed the tube in an Ants Canada large Omni Nest. It took almost a week for the workers to decide to forcibly drag the queen out of the tube but once they did the colony quickly exploded.

 

Btw, I highly suggest to not use Tarheel Ants Mini Hearths for founding. They will grow and do very well until anything causes stress before 30-50 workers. The problem with the Mini Hearth and Dorymyrmex is that Dorymyrmex's like to keep their brood, especially larvae and pupae, on the lowest floor in the form. When a Mini Hearth is bumped and the water enters the nest it of course pools at the bottom killing the brood. The workers will panic and leave the most of the brood and to make it worse, the majority of the time this has happened under observation the queens will completely stop laying eggs and she will die off within a few weeks to a month leaving the workers to wait to die off. I lost several colonies this way and it wasn't until I put them in forms that did not have internal water dishes that they became successful. 

 

I love Dorymyrmex, no stinger, no formic acid, more times than not you don't even know you've been bit by one, usually not aggressive and 'once' established they increase in numbers very quickly if they have the space. They also love to hang out in the outworld and are pretty active 24/7. Also, since they are a Florida species, you can save yourself a lot of hassle by just turning off their heat for Florida winter months and just keep them at AC room temp. The room I keep mine in ranges from 70-73 F year round and when I turn off their heat cables they barely slow down and will store up a LOT of brood for spring time...a lot. I've seen no stress whatsoever by doing a 'Florida' style diapause in AC rooms. But of course, it can be 40 F outside and the Dorymyrmex species are still running around like it's summer, lol. 

 

Hopefully some of the above will be helpful for you. Let me know if you have any questions on my flavus.

 

Dorymyrmex flavus is more of a Texas species and their true range apparently does not extend beyond western Louisiana. The difference between flavus and bureni is not with their color (the palest yellow bureni specimens tend to be ones collected from undisturbed sandhill areas), but with the shape of their mesonotum (central section of the mesosoma); flavus has a distinct angle just before their "cone" shape while bureni's is typically completely smooth before the cone. There has been a lot of taxonomic confusion with D. insanus, flavus, and bureni in the past, and it wasn't until the 1980s and 90s that it became clear that there were at least three species in the complex and that any flavus collected east of Louisiana actually refer to bureni. Some sites such as AntMaps show flavus sharing most of bureni's range, but the sources of those records are all either from before the 1980s or are seemingly unreliable. I've seen bureni colonies with workers that are so dark they appear like smithi, but actually turn out to be bureni once I collect them and take a better look. This is all according to Roy Snelling's 1995 paper and Mark Deyrup's 2016 "Ants of Florida" book.

 

Thank you for the tips on raising them, as I have never really experimented with Dorymyrmex enough to know how to get their sensitive colonies past nanitic stage. I tend to be reluctant to move my ants into nests nowadays because I strongly favor using test tubes and just adding more as the colony gets larger.

[jtremain]

When I look at Ants of Florida : identification and natural history / Mark Deyrup 2016, there is no Flavus and mine match closest to bureni. It is very interesting though that if all of the local specimens are bureni, there is an extreme range in darkening of the gasters, heads, and even the shape of the cones. Entire colonies in that we've observed in Jacksonville, Florida, are distinctly consistent with one variation or another. We have entire colonies with almost completely golden gasters and heads while a colony two feet away will have extremely dark gasters and heads. We first noticed it several years ago when I was helping my son with a science project where we were testing if there were color preferences in identical food sources, which btw there were some very interesting results if you're interested. I am wondering if there are two distinct sub-species due to the very distinct coloring and patterns that are specific to each colony. Kind of like blond versus brunette, lol.

[jtremain]

Are you aware of a fungus or bacteria that is a light blue color? My Dorymyrmex's combined graveyard/trash dump has small light areas that are visible under normal daylight but almost fluoresce under white LED lights. I tried an old stamp collecting UV light, which I believe is long wave, but that light is consistent with ambient sunlight. 

 

[Aaron567]

Are you aware of a fungus or bacteria that is a light blue color? My Dorymyrmex's combined graveyard/trash dump has small light areas that are visible under normal daylight but almost fluoresce under white LED lights. I tried an old stamp collecting UV light, which I believe is long wave, but that light is consistent with ambient sunlight. 

 

Never seen that before

[Aaron567]

April 22, 2020

 

A few days ago, the queen and three host workers of this colony suddenly died and were rapidly taken over by the yellow fungus. I am thinking this fungus may have been what killed them because I don't know why else they'd all randomly die like this, but I think this would be the first time I have ever had a colony die from any kind of fungus/mold. Here are some pictures so that others reading this journal can be cautious about this particular type of fungus when they see it because it may be dangerous to ants.

 

[RushmoreAnts]

Too bad. My entire collection was wiped out by a fungus a couple months ago.