101 replies to this topic

[Skwiggledork]

Probably a website that sells them.

[Salmon]

 

 

I obviously didn't read the whole thread, but here's my opinion on sustainable hunting.
I believe that collectors should only collect one or two native ant/wasp/termite/bee/whatever reproductives at a time, to give the wild population their best chance of survival. If the species is invasive, go ahead and catch the entire area's population! Just don't release them...

Eh. Restricting yourself to one or two is definitely going overboard, especially since some species have a low survival rate in captivity. No matter how rare an ant species is, for every queen you see there are hundreds in the area that have already disappeared into the ground and hundreds more that have been devoured by predators. If you walk into a field where a nuptial flight is going on to catch 20 queens, you might scare away a bird that would otherwise have eaten 40 of them. 

 

I personally don't see why someone would catch more than one or two. It might just be my experience with it, but just about every queen I catch has been successful, I only caught one F.subsericea queen and now I have a flourishing colony, that is how it has always been for me.

 

Have a look at some of those journals where several queens are captured but most of them perish long before establishing a healthy colony. (A lot of those cases might have to do with caring for them wrong, like keeping pleometrophic queens individually, but the point still stands.)

 

Not to mention that even if you have a good success rate, establishing several colonies allows you to pick the most vigorous one.