Mapping ant colonies

A colleague of mine forwarded this to me last week, but I went away and haven't had chance to deal with it properly until now.

Researchers at Texas A&M University used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to map a colony of Atta texana, producing a 3D model of the tunnels and chambers. It's all very clever and has the advantage of being non-invasive.

I've seen some of the models that Walter Tschinkel has produced and they are very attractive (and scientifically valuable). However, these models do result in the destruction of the colony and can be very time consuming to produce. By using GPR the colony is not destroyed.

Whilst I think that this is a great step forward, I doubt how well it can be implemented in the short term. The trouble is, whilst A. texana colonies are big, most ant colonies are small with narrow tunnels, and I doubt that the GPR would be sensitive to pick up all the finer details. Maybe in the future, if the sensitivity of the equipment improves, this technique will become more valuable. It's also much harder to visualise the colony without an actual physical model, though no doubt these could be created at additional cost if needed.

It will be interesting to see how this develops (and how the technology can be used in other fields - mapping European badger Meles meles setts for a start). More information is available on the project website.

I also followed a link from the BBC web page this was reported on and discovered that a friend of mine has made the news, again... (Show off.)

Witness to a birth... sort of

Seven weeks ago (to the day) I found a Lasius queen in a soil claustral cell beneath some moss in a woodland.

I don't make a habit of collecting Lasius queens to rear colonies from - they are two-a-penny in the UK (only slightly more expensive than a-dime-a-dozen at todays exchange rate) and the workers are marvellous escapologists, making them difficult to keep.

However, this queen looked like a Lasius flavus queen, so I thought she might be something more interesting since woodland is not the normal habitat for L. flavus. I collected the queen and the soil of the cell surrounding her and placed everything in a tube.

She had remained in that tube until yesterday, when I decided it was time to investigate why I hadn't seen any activity for about three weeks. Of course, this meant that when I discovered the queen and brood and two callow workers it was too late to get them back in the tube, so I had to find them some alternative accommodation in a plaster nest.

I left them to settle into the plaster nest, checking on them every couple of hours. Then in the early evening I counted not two but three workers, so I decided that I would take them into work today, so that I could keep an eye on them.

I'm glad I did. Not a lot happened until 16:00 when, as I was moving to get a drink, I spotted activity. The queen was licking what was obviously an emerging adult ant. The other workers were also showing an above normal level of excitement (i.e. they were moving, rather than just standing over the brood). The queen continued to lick this fourth worker for about 30 minutes, until she left it, twitching, presumably to harden its cuticle.

This was very exciting for me, as in ten years of studying ants it was something I had never before witnessed. To be fair, I've only been keeping ants for about a year and it's the sort of thing that you need to be in the right place at the right time to see.

Once I got them home, at around about 18:00, there was a fifth ant! They are yellow, so I'm becoming more convinced that they are just the common L. flavus, but they're entertaining me.

5-star hotel

The picture below was posted on the BWARS forum. This has to be the best bee hotel I've seen. If only I had a garden where I could build one of my own.

Death of a monarch

It's quite sad really. The queen of my Leptothorax acervorum colony has died. She was rather unceremoniously dumped at the far end of the foraging arena by the workers. It is possible that they have another queen. I can't check, as I cut the colony out in a piece of turf and, because they have been doing so well in there, left them alone.

I collected the colony earlier this year at Chevin Forest Park near Otley, West Yorkshire. In 2004 I collected a single dealate queen of Formica picea there, well outside of its established range. Despite frequent visits, no more F. picea have been found there. I went this year with Cedric Collingwood, who has helped me look for F. picea before, as we decided to make one last (unsuccessful) visit. The only good thing to come out of the trip was the L. acervorum colony.

Shortly after I got the L. acervorum home they produced an abundance of alate queens, but no males. Later they went into a period of inactivity when I started to wonder if they had all died, but then became active again a few weeks ago. Now that the queen has gone I'm wondering if the workers will produce any males, if there isn't another queen present.

I'd strongly recommend L. acervorum for anyone interested in keeping ants. They may be small, but they're kind of cute and very easy to look after. All they seem to need is a confined space with reasonable humidity and a steady supply of slightly crushed houseflies, which they hollow out. They will also drink sugar solution, but seem to prefer freshly-killed flies.