30 replies to this topic

[aniles71077]

May be best to leave my post off. I am a newbie and I only stated P. californicus because that was the forum's suggestion based off of pictures of workers. In any case, I'm just ESTATIC to have found and collected a queen that isn't L. humile! 

Edited by aniles71077, June 10 2015 - 6:40 AM.

[dspdrew]

I looked at that location and it's right in the middle of the city. I assume they were nesting in that dirt lot. I think these would most likely be P. californicus for that alone.

[Foogoo]

What's going on with the map? Am I the only one seeing a mess of points in the high desert?

[dspdrew]

Oh haha. I forgot to remove those. I put those on there to create a border around the areas that received heavy rain to make it easy to navigate while driving.

[William. T]

May be best to leave my post off. I am a newbie and I only stated P. californicus because that was the forum's suggestion based off of pictures of workers. In any case, I'm just ESTATIC to have found and collected a queen that isn't L. humile! 

Don't you have S. Invicta? Just pour water on a mound....

[Foogoo]

I've been playing with ArcGIS lately and exported your map to GIS. I'm not 100% familiar with the capabilities of GIS yet, but a few useful features I can think of would be filtering by species, date, etc. Let me know if there's anything else you think would be useful and I'll see if it can be done.

Edited by Foogoo, June 19 2015 - 11:21 AM.
Removed duplicate content

[aeximius]

Andrew, this map is great- what a useful resource!  Thanks so much for generating, and I hope to contribute in the coming months.  Quick question- do you happen to have the data (coordinates, etc) associated with each point in an excel or similar format and, if so, would you be willing to share it with me?  I'm interested in filtering to look at just the Formica species localities, and I didn't see how to do it with google maps.

[dspdrew]

Yeah, Google's "My Maps" application is not very nice. I don't have anything in Excel unfortunately, but I do have the KML file. It can be imported into Google maps or Google Earth, and probably other applications, so you can do what you want with it.

 

BTW, you might find this thread (http://www.formicult...ravida-journal/) helpful as well. It looks like nurbs has found a Formica species I haven't knowingly come across yet.

[aeximius]

Thanks for the tip - the photos and video of Formica aserva are super cool!  I am familiar with F. sanguinea, but I'd never seen any relatives before.  I was just near the trail where nurbs found the queen last w/e, too!  I wish I'd spotted these!  Thanks also for being willing to share your KML file- that format would be fine for me.  Is there a private message function on this forum?  Email would also work.  

 

I also noticed that you found Formica accreta out on the icehouse canyon trail near mt. baldy.  Have you ever spotted these anywhere else?  I found some black Formica up near the summit of Keller Peak- unfortunately, I didn't find the nest entrance in the vegetation.  I grabbed a few workers, but I don't have a microscope yet.  Thus, I haven't been able to take a close look, but they look like members of the fusca group to me.  For this w/e, I can't decide whether to go up toward mt. baldy, or whether to head out to the coast via rt. 74, to check out all that F. francoeuri habitat on the way...  

[dspdrew]

I have attached the files to the original post, so you can download them now.

 

That's awesome, I have never seen black Formica anywhere else around here but that one spot on my map, and it's a hell of a hike to get there, so I haven't been back since. That was a while back, before I had a microscope, so I never got any specimens or microscope pictures. Because of this, the ID was only based on some low resolution pictures I posted on the forum. The only thing everybody was pretty sure about was that they were from the fusca group.

[aeximius]

Cool!  Well, once I'm set up and get these guys identified (possibly with input from the forum...), I'll send you more info.  At some point, I'll probably go back up there to look for nests.  And thanks again (!) for the map data.  SO cool that you've compiled all of your observations like this.