We discuss the environmental impact of antkeeping often and some people worry that collecting queens could harm ant populations.
The consensus seems to be that, unless antkeeping becomes much much much more popular attracting industrial levels of collecting, taking alate queens is probably the least harmful way to get an ant colony.
Queens are released in the 100s and most are eaten by birds, or never find a place to nest. A queen collector denies a bird or lizard a meal mostly.
What is harmful is collecting established colonies. Worse? An establish colony hardly ever thrives after being collected, the trauma is just too much. The workers never adjust. It's not worth it.
So, if you want to keep ants learn when your local species fly and catch those queens. Don't feel bad about catching two or three for each colony you intend to raise. (Queens often randomly die early on.)
Put them in test tubes and there begins a multi-year commitment to an incredible pet.
Just what people know from experience. I don't think there is any particular mechanism.
But if a colony is dug up the ants see this as an attack. They will try to relocate but instead find themselves in an artificial environment with few options.
Whereas a single queen in a test tube quickly decides "yes I must have dug this perfect little hole" she quickly becomes less concerned with constantly fluctuating light & vibrations. All the workers have never known anything else.
@futurebird Some species of ants kidnap other ants and make them work for them. Do these ants have adjustment problems? Are there known variability to different ant species' ability to adjust to being enslaved?
There are special guides on keeping parasitic queens. Often this means raising a common species of queen (such as Formica subseria) and then stealing the brood and callows from that queens nest. You then introduce the parasitic queen to the brood and callows and hopefully she starts caring for them. (And they take care of her) and then she starts laying her own eggs and you have a colony.
Food is also a problem for established colonies. Ants are wary of new foods, when the colony learns that they like something they dig right in without hesitation. Pet colonies know how to drink sugar water from a feeder, how to get water to hydrate their nest from a water bottle and they learn to like dubias and feeder flies. In the wild they may have had a heard of aphids, or other complex relations that you break by digging up the colony. Rather than eat the pet food they grow weak.
A few factors cause some smaller species of ants to be attracted to electronics. The most basic is heat: electronics are warm. Ants look for ways to keep their brood warm.
Electronics are often in plastic cases. Ants find this delightful for maintaining precise levels of humidity. There are often narrow gaps that form perfect brood chambers.
Lastly there does seem to be something about electrical fields themselves that attracts some ants, this is poorly understood.
@futurebird Now I'm trying to think what the conversation with my landlord would be like if I ever asked for an exception to be made to the "no pets" rule for ants.
"What about a terrarium pet?"
"Oh, they're ants. But they'll be contained."
"Yes, I'm going to have to breed cockroaches too. But they will also stay in their container."
Rationally landlords should not care about pet ants because they won't scratch things or leave hair around which is what landlords worry about with cats and dogs. (And they worry too much.)
The laws are probably on your side so I would just not ask.
Often the law doesn't even allow "no dogs or cats" rules, but this varies.
Landlords can be upset about damage if it occurs and that's about it.
Irrationally? People think ants will "spread" this is so impossible it's absurd.
@futurebird@kechpaja here in Germany, any "no pets" roles, and any rules that tenants must get a permission for a pet from a landlord, only apply to "uncontained" pets; "contained" small pets (those that do not interact with the rental property directly) are explicitly excluded by law.
So having even a thousand of hamsters does not violate any "no pets" rules as long as they're in their cages / aquariums and are not free roaming all over the apartment.
Despite loving ants I have no wild ants in my apartment. I have wild house spiders (fat due to escaped ants) ant that's it.
Because I have Pica there are no pest roaches. My feeder roaches wouldn't last a day if they got out, but they are less interested in exploring than ants and never even try to climb the sides of their enclosure.
@futurebird@kechpaja I have at least one bathroom spider, and it makes using the bathroom feel a lot cozier. (Also black widows by the grill. A little less cozy.)
@futurebird@kechpaja
when I lived in the SF bay area, I visited about 4 exotic pet stores, and, strangely (or it seemed strange to me), more than half had various kinds of live feeder crickets that they sold out of open topped bins. It wasn't too difficult for the crickets to just hop out. And they did. Practically every where in the store, there were loose crickets.
This website is full of knee-jerk Pica defenders and worse? the "acolytes" (I think she is running a CULT) I try to explain all the things she is up to. I TRY so hard to warn people but more and more people just become "pro-Pica" and basically say she can do no wrong.
She steals the ham from my sandwich and everyone defends it. She runs online crypto scams and everyone buys them. I don't know what to do to stop her! #pica#caturday#catsofmastodon
Is she still selling those autographed bibles? I've learned so much from the one I bought, like for example how it's totally OK to covet your neighbor's mozzarella sticks.
@kechpaja@futurebird@errg somewhat relieved it’s a cat named Pica and not you, like, having pica with a compulsion to eat roaches, and capitalizing it for some reason
I'm skeptical about if one can make a key from a photo (I've tried it and it failed badly) But I know who see my posts and I would get so many complaints if I don't blur them ... FINE... LMAO
It's probably for the best either way.
(If someone knows where I live and gets past the doorman and cameras I have bigger problems than a fake key 😬-- my building is pretty darn secure IMO)
“you don't have to worship and serve her OK? you know that... right?”
You aren’t being clear. The way that you wrote that sounds like Pica doesn’t need worshipers to serve her. You just mean that the application process is arduous and we shouldn’t get our hopes up.
Right?
@futurebird@errg@kechpaja what a face!! My cat Pixel doesn’t eat bugs. She plays with them. She’ll bat them around the living room until their little batteries run out. Then she’ll just leave them there for me to deal with. If she ate them at least she’d clean up her own mess!
What I did for my mom. I observed the ants in her kitchen for days making her exasperated since I wouldn't let anyone kill them. I found their nest (outside under a rock) and how they were getting in (old milk delivery box) WHY they were coming in (for water) There was a leak under the sink (where I found a second colony of carpenter ants.)
I relocated the carpenter ants, fixed the leak and sealed the holes. No more unwanted breakfast guests!
I could do "pest control" and be very good at it. But most people lack the patience for my methods.
If my mom had sprayed them like she wanted to they would have come back in two months when the spray wore off. She would have killed the helpful spiders that are keeping things in balence, and the carpenter ants would have exploded in population freaking her out more.
To shape an ecosystem (our homes are ecosystems) you must observe and understand it first.
@futurebird@dotsandlines The worst thing about sprays is how almost all of them kill spiders, and advertise this like it's a feature rather than like an HP printer.
@dalias@futurebird@dotsandlines Some pesticide company in my area is cold calling this summer. First they say they are "helping" a neighbor with a spider and ant outbreak. Then they offer to provide the same chemical-free spray service to me. Uh, I'd rather my spiders were left alone, and I'm 100% certain they are spraying chemicals. It might not be an organophosphate, but it is a chemical of some sort.
Maybe if I ever have to give up teaching I will open up a "Meditate and Observe Insect Management" service
When inspecting a problem the first steps would be observation of the insects and then meditation on why they are there doing whatever they are doing? How have we made conditions that lead to this happening? What can we change?
I'd probably charter your services. I drove my wife to distraction when we had ants in the house and I always told her, that we need to find out how and why they get into the house (and prevent them from doing so), instead of poisoning them in the house. The latter makes no sense, because there are always more ants outside (waiting to get into the house I presume).
Exactly. And if the queen is outside? It's a hopeless method.
Insects make sense and do things for sensible reasons. If you don't want them around you can remove the things that attract them, block their paths, and change the environment so they don't bother you anymore.
It's not like "pests" get a kick out of making people scream & creeping us out. They are just trying to live. We've somehow sent them the wrong message that they are welcome where they are not.
@futurebird@glitzersachen@dotsandlines do the scouts return to the nest every night, so they can be tracked? I seem to always have a few just sort of hanging out, slowly exploring. They don't call out a large horror show formation, but having a random scout exploring your neck is a bit too much.
Many species of ants have multiple nests, older ants may never return to the main nest, but relay information about good finds to younger ants who have contact with the queen and brood. This is a natural barrier to keep poisons and pathogens from reaching the most sensitive and irreplaceable members of the colony.
So to track ants you may first need to find the outpost, then track those going from outpost to the main nest.
@futurebird
Your interest in ants is making me giggle. As a child I was fascinated by… just about everything, & did have an “ant farm”, in a glass jar. I don’t remember what became of the poor things. I don’t like it when ants invade my home, but am careful not to step on them outside.
We’re trying to deal with an incursion of fire ants in Australia, which could pose a serious threat to our wildlife & our outdoorsy lifestyles.
They were living in the insulation of the pipe. I picked it up in one chunk, checked I had the queen & took them to the other side of the creek. Then I used my ant vacuum to get the dozen or so angry stragglers. Put them with the rest of the colony and watched with delight as they all disappeared into a crack near the foot of an oak tree.
They will miss having "running water" but there is a stream right there... figure it out, girls! You can't live with my mom!
When I kept feeder crickets (because I didn't want to keep roaches, out of my NYC prejudice against them-- I'm glad I got over that, dubias are much better feeders than crickets... dubias don't smell, don't make noise) A cricket escaped and was chirping from under the couch for a month.
Feeder crickets are VERY annoying to keep and I could see escaped crickets becoming "a problem"
@futurebird@kechpaja This brings back some memories... When I was finishing my MSc thesis, I used to stay late in the lab writing. Next door was the reptiles lab, so they kept feeder crickets. And of course one cricket escaped into our lab, hid under our freezer, and kept serenading me every night for one month.
@SapoconchaTradutora@futurebird@kechpaja 😹 Heh! Reminds me of a time when I simply could not find a REALLY LOUD cricket CHIRPING AWAY in our kitchen. Finally located it in the metal echo chamber of an empty tea kettle sitting right on the counter. 🤦♂️
@futurebird@SapoconchaTradutora@kechpaja Well, in admiration and recognition of his cricket genius, I did at least carry him in that vessel of honor to the great outdoors and set him free.
🦗💨
…Plus, ever since, I ALWAYS keep the lid on that kettle! 🤣
@indigoparadox@kechpaja@futurebird well, at least the cultural development that they appear to have gone through in a single moment of non-time, pulled them towards mammalian beauty standards. could be worse.
@ireneista@kechpaja@futurebird "That Time My Pet Cockroach Became a Supermodel and MMA Champion," a soon-to-be-released autobiographical light novel. 😌