40 replies to this topic

[Jez]

I'm not really that experienced in ant keeping yet but I do know they don't multiply at the rate that you are hoping for. It would take alot of work just to maintain your colonies. Never seen a pangolin but I've seen echidnas eat ants, and they eat ALOT.
Best bet would be to make lots of traps that you could leave in the bush and collect.
Good luck

Edited by Jez, March 27 2017 - 4:56 AM.

[Ants4fun]

How many ants would a pangolin need to consume every day? Your best bet would be to dig up mature colonies. Although it is not a good process for ant keeping, it would take far too long to collect lone queens.

[Jez]

Just read how much pangolins eat. 140-200g of insects a day. Over a kilo a week. That's alot of ants..

[thosaka]

20 bucks says its 10 times easier to find an ant colony in the wild and let the animals loose and have them find the ants themselves, digging the top few inches of an ant entrance can also coax the ants to come up.

[Vanko]

Well i don't know anything about these ants but if they are not a polygyne species with a LOOT of queens in a colony it will be very hard to harvest more than a few grams a day per colony

[BMM]

Just a thought, but could you possibly catch a large number of ants from a wild colony and put them into hibernation? They won't multiply, but they'd still be alive and would require minimal care. That might allow you to space out your "harvests" so that the wild colonies have time to recover.

[Vanko]

African ants and hibernation... is it possible?

[klawfran3]

I used to work with Anteaters, Tamanduas to be exact, and we would feed ours high protein diets of wet dog/cat food, mealworms and crickets, and sometimes honey as a treat. Pangolins, although they're not very closely related to anteaters, have a very similar niche in the environment and I would expect their care to be somewhat similar. They have a high fiber diet due to the chitinous exoskeletons in the insects they eat.

Raising ants on a large enough scale to run a full time rescue would be a very big, if not impossible undertaking. Anteaters and pangolins visit many different mounds of ants a day in order to meet their caloric needs, so you would need a very large amount of established colonies to take care of one. I feel like it would be unnecessary to attempt to do this in captivity and instead use other feeder insects and other foods to meet their nutritional needs.

[Alabama Anter]

20 bucks says its 10 times easier to find an ant colony in the wild and let the animals loose and have them find the ants themselves, digging the top few inches of an ant entrance can also coax the ants to come up.

That is the best way possible. 

[Shareallicu]

Interesting!  I don't recall hearing about pangolins before.  I love all creatures, I hope you can find a few huge colonies of ants to help keep the pangolins around and to be able to maintain the ant colonies as well.

[Batspiderfish]

I'm sorry, but this is incredibly sketchy. Nothing in this first post sounds professional at all, especially with the mention of an animal reward. I need more than video clip from a documentary before I would help a complete stranger care for "the most trafficked mammal" while also hearing about your terrarium show in Germany, an epicenter for animal trafficking. Why are you here, on a forum, instead of getting in contact with an accredited professional? I cannot in good conscience Leave this topic up with so little information about who is seeking help from this forum.

I'm sure you'll understand as a biologist that animal trafficking is taken seriously.

[Reacker]

I'm sorry, but this is incredibly sketchy. ... Why are you here, on a forum, instead of getting in contact with an accredited professional?...

 

This times a thousand. 

 

The ant keeping forums in the English speaking part of the internet probably don't have more than a dozen truly competent and qualified members spread out among them that are capable of giving you the level of expert advice that a real rescue operation such as what you purport to be would need. Even the few truly competent ant keepers on this forum will have literally zero experience with any ant species that you need to cultivate, and can only provide you with general principles of ant keeping that you could get from a few minutes of Googling. 

 

Your best bet by far is to contact actual Myrmecologists with experience with these types of things; that you haven't done so but rather made inquiries here is somewhat suspicious. 

 

Edit: That said, I apologize if you are in earnest and we have misjudged you but as the previous poster has said we have good reason to do so. 

Edited by Reacker, March 29 2017 - 9:16 AM.

[Aljosha]

I have a colony of Anoplolepis custodiens, but I know very little about them, I have a colony of 25 workers and 2 queens

so basically they are polygyne, so grow rate must be quite fast, the very few photo's about the species that are available on the internet show big colums of ants.
I don't know how fast it takes from egg to worker since I recently got my colony and they haven't laid any eggs yet neither .( no brood was present except for a larvae but they ate it the next day, shipping stress)

I know that they must be kept very hot ( 22-32°C ) and the humidity must be low ( 30-50%). The hotter the temperature the faster the brood develops)).

I would really like to give you more information but I don't know anything else about them. If I know more I will post it here.

[Miles]

Hi CaveBear,

 

Please send me a private message. With further information and a verification of legitimacy provided, my organization would be happy to do what we can to assist in this vital conservation effort.

Edited by Miles, March 29 2017 - 2:19 PM.

[Annexis]

Okay, While I'm not familiar with those species, I do know that both of them need the same food sources etc. I would recommend buying an established colony with workers which you can buy at some websites I'm sure would ship to Africa. Care for them should be simple formicaria and feed them insects and honey for a sugar source. Now this is just my opinion. I have never kept or handled either species so I am not an expert. Hope this helped.

[CaveBear]

Hi everybody! 

I've just gotten back to civilization from the darien- Id be happy to provide some legitimacy. Ill message some of the more experienced members and provide proof in private to back me up. I definitely havent filled in any info on my account here, sorry.


Let me read through and process some of your very helpful replies, this is quite a lot of information, and I am only in email contact with tikki hywood trust right now, so I need to keep asking specific questions about the exact function of these colonies for the rescues. I am excited to learn that it is potentially a polygyne species- that adds some more feasibility.

EDIT: BTW, the mymecologists I know are all heavily specilized in neotropical species. This is less of an abstract scientific problem, and more of a culturing problem. At least in the roach world, the best roach researchers and roach culturers are not the same, nor do they necessarily even know each other. But you can bet everyrone into blattaculture knows the best person to ask about a specific species! So, sorry for sounding sketch, I'm sure every bug sub-culture has its own idiosyncrasies 

 

Edited by CaveBear, March 29 2017 - 9:44 PM.

[CaveBear]

I have a colony of Anoplolepis custodiens, but I know very little about them, I have a colony of 25 workers and 2 queens

so basically they are polygyne, so grow rate must be quite fast, the very few photo's about the species that are available on the internet show big colums of ants.
I don't know how fast it takes from egg to worker since I recently got my colony and they haven't laid any eggs yet neither .( no brood was present except for a larvae but they ate it the next day, shipping stress)

I know that they must be kept very hot ( 22-32°C ) and the humidity must be low ( 30-50%). The hotter the temperature the faster the brood develops)).

I would really like to give you more information but I don't know anything else about them. If I know more I will post it here.

Very good to know! How long have you had them?
What are you feeding them? 

 

[Jez]

....I am excited to learn that it is potentially a polygyne species- that adds some more feasibility.

Sorry, but it isn't feasible to 'farm' the ants.

[CaveBear]

here are some observations and answers to questions that I've just recieved from the caretakers:
 

"There is the fire ant (just one queen per colony), little ants which my kids (*pangolins*) are not so keen on, bigger black ants with rice grain eggs ...... see how scientific I am about ants! Maybe I should try to take some photos for you!

My kids are very spoilt and are happiest when they can eat a lot of eggs. Eggs are really good for compromised and very young animals - easily digested and high value.

If the babies are so young that they are still on milk, we bottle feed with kitten milk formula. Really bad adults will get a mushy meat mix with additives down a tube. If they are able to walk, we take them to ants, turning over rocks to find eggs. Termites are good but they tend to gorge on them and then not touch them for a few days. The babies get sore tummies if they eat too many termites!

We have never managed to get any to eat an artificial diet willingly like the black bellied and white bellied seem to. 

The captive ant population is intended as an emergency source and supplementary source. It will never be the entire diet as release is always the goal which is best prepared for by taking them out into the bush to feed naturally."

So it doesnt seem that non-ant foods are going to work, but all this information, combined with the polygyne fact, gives me a bit more hope about actually being able to make useful captive colonies for them!

 

....I am excited to learn that it is potentially a polygyne species- that adds some more feasibility.

Sorry, but it isn't feasible to 'farm' the ants.

 

Why not? I don't really understand the context of your response....

[Aljosha]

 

I have a colony of Anoplolepis custodiens, but I know very little about them, I have a colony of 25 workers and 2 queens

so basically they are polygyne, so grow rate must be quite fast, the very few photo's about the species that are available on the internet show big colums of ants.
I don't know how fast it takes from egg to worker since I recently got my colony and they haven't laid any eggs yet neither .( no brood was present except for a larvae but they ate it the next day, shipping stress)

I know that they must be kept very hot ( 22-32°C ) and the humidity must be low ( 30-50%). The hotter the temperature the faster the brood develops)).

I would really like to give you more information but I don't know anything else about them. If I know more I will post it here.

Very good to know! How long have you had them?
What are you feeding them? 

 

 

As I mentioned in the post before I got them recently (5 days now)

They really like sugary foods, honey and sugar water.

As protein they are a little bit picky.. They dislike crickets but do like moths and mealworms, fruitflies and tiny roaches.

I also noticed that they won't accept food that's dead, better give them a half-dead insect.

If you were to try and dig out a nest of these ants, it would be a really hard task to do because they are really really fast.