128 replies to this topic

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.5.24

Although I've fed my other colonies cut up fly larvae and pupae recently, I've decided to stick with seeds with my Vero pergandei for a while.

I'm also going to update the first entry with general notes and food notes.

 

I will also add that I have acquired the following (which triggered the little disaster I wrote about on the 21st):

• A small Veromessor andrei colony. I guess I will call them "VA" ... the queen is tiny!!!
• And, a group of 6 Veromessor pergandei queens in one tube. I guess I will call them "VP3"
• I will go back to calling my main colony of Vero pergandei "VP1"
• The satellite group I split off from VP1 I guess I'll call ... VP1-satellite

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, May 24 2020 - 1:03 AM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.5.29 GAH AGAIN

VP1: I was trying to get some condensation off the top glass window, when my hand slipped and a bunch of ants came rushing out. Of course. I quickly put the window back on because the queen was at risk, and naturally I wound up with squashed ants.

 

Cue an hour of trying to clean the space between formicarium and glass.. Refrigerating the Fallen Fortress. Try cleaning the glass. More squashed ants.

More refrigeration.

 

Finally I gave up trying to make the ants chill (literally) and just found a sturdy plain white piece of white printer paper (good quality so thick) and slid it beneath the window. I used that to scrape dead ants off here and there, also knocking off grains of sand the ants had inserted between the formicarium and the glass.

I did panic the whole colony to the point where the queen finally bailed on the nest and went into the outworld.

I got most of the dead ants out and only left one sand/dead ant pile between the glass and the formicarium. They are busy trying to fill the gap with sand again. There are bits of white printer paper left lying around in the nest, too.

 

Now I'm thinking about what to feed them to apologize for messing up their world and accidentally killing a bunch of them.

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, May 29 2020 - 11:41 AM.

[ANTdrew]

I highly recommend making one of Mad’s DIY aspirators. It makes gathering up escapees a snap. Then you can dump the whole container at once in the outworld.

[OhNoNotAgain]

Yeah someone on discord was saying to just use an aspirator, but I wasn't totally sure how that would work. There would be ants pouring out over the formicarium non-stop - so would I basically have to suck up ALL the ants, probably including some brood?

[ANTdrew]

You’d want to plug the breach, then aspirate the escapees. Dump the collected ants back into the outworld.

[OhNoNotAgain]

The breach would unfortunately be the whole nest in the case of trying to clean under a Fallen Fortress window.  

[ANTdrew]

I was responding to the previous escape. I would just refrain from removing the glass on THA nests. It’s not really feasible with large colonies. I’ve never even attempted it.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.5.30

Man VP1 is getting scary. They have about 20 workers constantly trying to escape the outworld. I did something in the outworld - I think cleaned it a bit - and the riled them up and they were all over the outworld walls. I used a brush to take a few would-be escapers out and as an experiment put just a few in with my jumping spiders (see if the spiders would eat them; they've just recently molted and have hardened up so they aren't very vulnerable, either). But then the ants back in the Fallen Fortress went HAYWIRE. A big contingent of ants rushed up the corner where the brush touched, like a massive upside-down black waterfall. I used the brush to grab more of the escape-seeking workers and stuck them in the satellite mini-hearth so they wouldn't wear out the main colony's Fluon barrier. But the reverse waterfall kept happening in the Fallen Fortress. I wonder if the brush has some alarm scents on it, or the scent of other ants (I've used it on Tetramorium). Then I sprayed some water in that corner of the outworld and the ants calmed down in that corner.

 

Meanwhile, though, the mini-hearth has a reverse waterfall going up one corner now.

 

I guess my main VP colony has passed some kind of milestone and they are now officially a kind of scary colony. I'm definitely no longer worried about losing individuals. Removing 20+ doesn't even really seem to dent their numbers.

 

If VP3 (the 6 queen colony) takes off ... wow I have no idea how scary they could get.

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, May 30 2020 - 2:18 PM.

[ANTdrew]

Yup. You fed the gremlins after midnight.

[Canadant]

I highly recommend making one of Mad’s DIY aspirators. It makes gathering up escapees a snap. Then you can dump the whole container at once in the outworld.

I absolutely second this. Took me only an hour or two and works great. I've used it for spills and collecting outdoors. They work great and are extremely inexpensive.

Would love to see your jumping spiders. Sounds cool. I'll have to try them someday.

[OhNoNotAgain]

I've definitely fed the gremlins after midnight, or got them wet or something (seriously who would get a pet that fissions into horribleness upon getting WET). Or my analogy is "carnivorous tribbles." (Imagine if that Trek episode had had carnivorous tribbles....)

I found a couple articles about how scary large pergandei colonies really are. Like how they destroy spider webs in revenge. Or mob lizards so that lizards avoid them. And 650 new ants PER DAY are you kidding me.    The Fluon barrier is starting to wear out and my only hope is that Vaseline works then (because thankfully... they are NOT as fast as my fraggles, who today learned they can cannonball UP the wall and ignore the surface coatings).

 

I will have to look into the aspirator!

 

Compared to ants, the jumpers are really really REALLY sedate. In fact my slings seem to spend most of their time molting - I gave them each 1 maggot 3X bigger than they are and that was enough to make them molt/grow ... then the next time 2 maggots were enough to make them molt/grow ... this time they are bigger than the maggots and I wonder if 4 maggots will be enough to make them molt. Since molting takes at least a week these days and all they do is hide in their web hammock, it's like having a pet dust bunny during that time. lol

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, May 30 2020 - 11:41 PM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.6.4 Photo update! Thought I'd post some pics of the other colonies as well as an update on VP1.

 

Here is VA1 (Veromessor andrei). I can't get over how TINY the queen is (far left side), esp. compared to pergandei.

 

 

VP1 (my main Veromessor pergandei colony) is doing scarily well. Even having removed workers into the satellite colony, they have filled up the Fallen Fortress - and they only moved in back in April!! (And then they only filled in half the rooms!) Ten months ago they only had NINE WORKERS.

 

Today I reduced the heating pad from 85 to 80F. Anyway the house temp is 80F and the room is warmed by the afternoon sun, so it goes above 80F anyway. They don't need to grow any faster.

 

And remember they broke through the Fluon? Earlier today I wiped down the area of the breach, just with moist paper towel. Then tonight I tried reapplying a layer of Fluon. I HOPE it works. They were doing a screw-you-we-rule dance on the top of the outworld, just under the lid, before I reapplied the Fluon.

 

Top down view of outworld with crazy Veros and nest.

 

Top down view of just nest. You can see how much more crowded it is now, despite having removed a bunch of workers in the last OOPS incident.

 

Zooming in and look at all the gray-colored callows and pupae nearly ready to eclose!!

 

VP3 in contrast to VP1. Lookit the tangled mass of big fat queens! The brood is tiny in comparison to VP3's, but I am seriously, seriously getting worried about how fast this colony is going to grow if they do well, now that I'm seeing how crazy VP1 is.

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, June 4 2020 - 10:40 PM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.6.13

Took some macro photos and did some observations. Why do I always do this late at night when there is insufficient light? I don't know.

 

First photo:

Someone said I don't have majors yet because of lack of insect protein. So I fed them two cut open fly pupae.

Then I refilled their nestmate with water and got a huge crowd of ants. I guess I haven't watered them well in over a week. So as as experiment I put a few drops of water on their feeding dish, and BOOM! massive crowds of ants. Guess they were thirsty....

Their dish (from a supplement bottle lid) is swarming with thirsty and hungry ants.

 

All of the below photos are 90 degrees off from how I took them. But they still show the relevant stuff.

 

Second photo: phat loot

 

In Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants of California, the author writes that Veromessor are the '"Scrooge McDucks" of the desert, tycoons of Ant-town, with their own money bins stockpiled with riches....'

Here's one of the seed vaults, piled high like a dragon's treasure room:

 

 

 

Third photo: young mummypupating ants 

 

This is the older brood chamber. In this (sideways) photo is a callow looking a lot like a creepy mummy ready to come to life. Yes, her mom's butt is in the photo, too.

 

I watched today as the callows made their first movements, appearing to run their start-up protocols for getting their bodies properly wired up, revved up, and ready to get to work - legs twitching in a walking rhythm, just like I observed a dying Camponotus do. One young callow was quite clumsy and landed sideways, almost on her back, and lay there looking either like she was flailing around or trying to preen her antennae or something. Ah, toddlers.

 

 

 

Fourth photo: Young larvae and an ant trying to chew up a seed

 

This is the younger brood chamber, where smaller larvae are tended. The ant on the seed is working hard to cut off a piece. I have footage of her digging her mandibles into the surface of the seed, and then rocking her body sideways back and forth. Sort of like how you might put a spade into hard dirt and rock it back and forth to try to get a chunk of dirt out. She didn't try to chew a piece out; she leveraged her whole body to try to gouge out a piece.

 

Black shadowy smudges in the photo may be out of focus ants in the foreground, climbing on the glass.

 

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, June 13 2020 - 9:05 PM.

[ANTdrew]

Seems like an awesome ant to keep. I know that screw-you-we-rule-the-world dance all too well.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.6.15

One of the 6 queen starter colony was lying on her side, twitching, clearly dying. I don't know what happened. I did move the tube and I recently put in dandelion seeds (bought from THA), but aside from that ... I don't know. The other 5 seem to be okay.

 

Well, having nothing else to lose, I put the dying queen in the outworld of VP1's satellite group (the all-worker mini-hearth, where they have been isolated from their own queen for weeks now).

I was really curious what would happen.

A couple workers would go up and smell the queen and walk over her with mandibles open. I figure mandibles open = aggressive signaling.

Eventually a worker started aggressively dragging her around by the antenna. Then another dragged her around by the leg.

But ... nothing really coordinated... yet.

 

Mostly just concerned that one of the queens died. Hopefully not a new trend. Their brood is to the point of comma-shaped larvae, but not much beyond that.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.6.27

 

Today SUCKED in that I lost a bin of isopods that had been doing well. Basically didn't water enough in time. SUPER bummed. But a big big reminder how fast invertebrates die without water (well, vertebrates too, but pet vertebrates have a way of complaining when they don't have enough water).

 

VP1: Yesterday I was trying to guesstimate the number of ants in VP1 and I could be wrong, but I came up with 500+. The nest is practically pitch black with ants. The outworld is basically crawling ALL DAY ALL NIGHT with over 50 ants. They've worn through the Fluon and when I looked at them just now they are walking along the top....

I guess they are really really ready to move to a bigger formicarium.

Last week I was feeding fruit flies to the largest three colonies (VP1, fraggles, Tetras) and fraggles were making their usual alarm drumming noises ... and there was a strange noise coming from VP1. I looked and found a worker in the seed storage treasure room trying hard to chomp through the Type III wall. Yup, one ant, trying to expand the nest, making a racket.

 

VP1-satellite: The queen I mentioned before was lying there dead when I checked back a few hours later. They are gradually losing workers but probably at a normal rate? Anyway I'm pretty ready to say this mini-hearth isn't contaminated with whatever killed Derpymessor.

 

VP3: The formerly 6 queen group is still hanging in there with 5 queens. I'm surprised they don't have nanitics yet, but given the massive brood pile I'm not really worried about them.

 

VA: Still going. 

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, June 27 2020 - 9:57 PM.

[TechAnt]

I thought seeds were only required as a diet for VP. No?

[JenC]

Insects provide a nice boost. They aren't required

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.7.4

Surreal 2020 4th of July, with eclipses and weird news and weird ants.

 

VP1: For about a week(?) I've been trying to move them OUT of their Fallen Fortress and into a Labyrinth nest. They haven't moved yet, but the FF has only just run out of drinking water and the tower is probably not empty yet. Some notes:

 

• The workers are SO excited to have somewhere else to go. They go running through the connecting tube with incredible enthusiasm and speed, moving seeds or possibly random brood back and forth.
• They are not trying to escape the outworld nearly as much as before.
• So far they've only really moved seeds to the new nest.

The old Fallen Fortress is sitting on the Labyrinth nest (because lack of space):

 

 

That is NOT broccoli, guys:

 

I remember someone posted about Veromessor cutting up broccoli to feed their brood. But why. are. they. cutting. up. their fake plastic plant...?!

At least they figure out it's trash.... I think.

 

And speaking of wtf stuff, WHAT THE F IS THIS:

 

 

VP3: Today I found this weird, possibly mutant nanitic dying in the test tube while feeding a fruit fly. No matter how I look at it I can't quite figure out what was going on with this poor thing that looks like it came out a Star Trek transporter all wrong. I mean I thought for a while something happened and part of its gaster was chewed off, but the head looks really, really WEIRD (including from other angles that I didn't include in this photo). Is it just me or is this thing seriously not normal?

 

 

 

VA: They are doing okay. Random photo just because.

 

Edited by OhNoNotAgain, July 4 2020 - 9:55 PM.

[OhNoNotAgain]

2020.7.9 

 

What a day. 

MOST of the Veros had moved to the Labyrinth, but a lot were still in the Fallen Fortress.

First, ran an experiment to see if cold would drive VP1 out of Fallen Fortress and into Labyrinth. Wasn't working. BUT then it knocked out a nestmate. I had sleepy cold perganei everywhere. And THEN look at this horrible expensive OOPS. I accidentally dropped something on the Fallen Fortress.... 

 

 

One thing led to another.

I had ants everywhere x3. I spent the next couple hours catching ants.  

 

Here are the few stragglers I collected. (There are still more, but this is most of them.)

 

 

And then, as long as I was being nuts with the ants, I decided to take the ants out of the satellite colony and return them to the main colony. So I took some out of the mini-hearth and put them in the Labyrinth outworld along with all the other ants I was dumping in.

 

OOPS AGAIN. It's been so long apparently the main colony no longer recognized them!!!! Before I knew it what I believe were the poor poor poor satellite ants were being destroyed by their sisters.

 

    

 

 

I had put a few of the escaped ants into the satellite nest, and those appear to be getting killed (or vice versa) as well.

 

I now have almost all of VP1 in the Labyrinth. However, nest and outworld are easily detached so I'm a little worried about future OOPS events!!