Their queen died due to a tragic accident. That was weeks ago. They have since produced queen alates and many eggs. The queen alates are offspring of the dead queen. But the new eggs laid by either the workers or the new queens have matured and you know what I’m NOT seeing? Male alates! That means that either the workers or the new queens have managed to produce female workers! An ant miracle… though not unheard of. Just not in this genus!
I'm so confused. I realize if you don't know about ant reproduction this might not seem that crazy but there are no male ants in this set up. In nearly all ants the only way you get a female is from a fertilized egg.
@futurebird right. there are examples of this.
the first time i remember was hints of it in Wassmania auropunctata (probly have new name by now and maybe the story has been sorted out?)
can join two eggs together and produce diploid young. it's hard tho. that's why queens go thru the trouble of making sperm factories out of their haploid eggs just so they can inseminate other ladies.
Imagine keeping your boyfriend in the attic crawlspace and just ... pumping out like 200 babies going "I don't know how this could be happening?" the whole time.
@futurebird oh! these are YOUR ants. keep us posted! how did you come to have Dorymyrmex Bureni? i've never consceiously encountered Dorymyrmex in the wild.
He had a list of states where you could buy them basically the east coast and the south. You could not buy these ants in WA or UT however. I guess that's just what the permit said?
The permitting process has been getting a bit more reasonable ... slowly.
For example why the heck can one ship Pogonomyrmex occidentalis to every state? But if you want Acromyrmex versicolor forget about it.
@futurebird is it supposed to be better to purchase ants than to find your own colonies?
i admit when i collected ants manyyears ago i found my own. but didn't have the heart to dig up whole colonies with queen. just one was with queen cuz whole colony was in an acorn!
even without queen (but with some brood) they were fascinating to observe.
@futurebird when i was collecting ants i DID live in nyc. central park, jamaica bay wildlife refuge etc...
i had: Brachymyrmex, Paratrechina, Aphaenogaster, Crematogaster... i can't remember who the 5th was. there were certainly Lasius, Formica and Camponotus around!
i remember finding a Myrmecina in central park, that was exciting.
@futurebird very interesting. the paratrechina in the acorn were from central park. the crematogaster were from jamaica bay. i remember there were tapinoma (banana ants) at the bronx zoo. the brachymyrmex were from... don't remember
@futurebird way back when i was trying grad school in missouri, i did have a fresh queen Camponotus and two of her offspring. they were very slow at what they were doing.
Camponotus is famous for being super slow to get their colonies going. My pennslyvanicus queen spent her whole first year doing basically nothing. She laid eggs. Ate them. Laid more, then had like four workers for ten months. Then... she started laying more after her second diapause, huge heap of eggs. Now the colony is pushing 1000
I have been wanting to get some aquatic isopods but I didn't go to school for this sort of stuff and it's an obscure thing almost nobody thinks about so I have very little idea where to look. And shipping in live critters from outside California seems to be largely prohibited. Not had much luck in the wild yet either although they're supposed to be very common.
Just tried to look up what isopods are even native here and wound up reading a paper that listed 15 species in a survey, half of which are exotic introductions, some stuff about how there are probably a lot more but nobody knows really and almost nobody is checking, and then at the end a link to an article about taxonomy being a "science in crisis" and I read part of that and now I need to sit down and stare into the distance for a while.
@futurebird@fivetonsflax it sounds as important as a lot of papers I've read. Definitely more important than the "faster than light neutrinos" paper (I follow physics more than biology), for example. Maybe you could co-author with someone?