eagle300's Journal

Ant season again! Its been suprisingly warm and humid up here, and the ants are coming back early. The carpenter ant colony hasn't been active, but the F. glacialis nest sure is busy today.

I saw a glacialis worker dragging the body of a fellow worker, whose mandibles where fastened on the body of yet another glacialis worker, this one still living! I can't imagine how the two got attached. My best guess is that one worker had been injured, and another tried to haul it to the burial grounds (injured ants are usually treated as dead) but was killed in the process. Or maybe it was attacking a glacialis worker from another colony. I cant locate another colony in the area, though. Maybe it was just the results of a domestic squabble. Maybe F. glacialis is domestically aggressive? Its not a very documented species, so I'm just shooting in the dark.
Either way, I'll definently do some research on that rigor mortis that causes the ants to have such a secure hold on things, even after expiring. Seen it twice so far and its very interesting.

Yesterday, the ants in my area where very active because there was a big storm the night before and it was very humid. So I witnessed a lot of interesting stuff. First off, all the colonies were really agressive. The carpenter ant colony (which I found a few days earlier in a tree trunk) seems to be the main target. The F. incerta and F. galacialis colonies all have dispatched workers over there, and can often be seen carrying back bodies of rival raiders, carpenter ant workers (even majors) and pupae. I saw one F. incerta worker carrying the body of her nestmate, with the body of an enemy worker attached by the mandibles! While she was carrying this heavy load back, she had to cross a colony of tiny pavement ants (Tetramorium sp. E) that had entrenched by her nest entrance. They seemed to come out of nowhere, and they started climbing on the load, and eventually the worker let it go and scrambled to her nest, probably to get help.

I have often noticed that Tetramorium nest by the colonies of larger ants. They rob the larger ants of their prey when they return to the nest. I'll have to look in to that some more. Anywhay, I also managed to catch a Lasius neoniger queen, and I am going to try and raise a colony.There was also a huge, black and yellow wasp flying around. Today I saw F. incerta hauling in the body. A little bit of a relief.

There's a species of ants that looks very similiar to F. glacialis, but with diffirent coloration. Checked it out on Antweb and it looks like Formica incerta. I saw some of those tiny yellow ants hauling one of these guys in to the nest. must have caught it foraging alone.

They P. pilifera colony seems to be taking more hits, as half a dozen bodies were discovered in the colony of a small yellow ant, that may be a theif ant nest. Meanwhile, tensions between F. glacialis workers and the pilifera nest are rising. Many glacialis workers are running frenzily around in the area, perhaps more raids are brewing. Also, workers of the species, Camponotus Pennsylvanicus, the great carpenter ant, are abroad.

While poking around the great outdoors, I noticed one particularly large ant nest, maybe a foot wide with half a dozen entrance holes.the ants were medium sized, dull black or grey in color. I later recognized them as being of the genus Formica. After further inspection of the nest, I noticed the shriveled corpses of a much smaller ant littering a few of the uppermost tunnels. I searched around for the victim nest, but found nothing until the next day.
The nest in a question was much more modest than the former, measuring only a couple inches wide, with but a single entrance hole. A lone, large-headed soldier patrolled just outside the mound. The Formica ants must have been raiding this newly emerging colony, and the small colony was doing it's best to defend itself with it's limited population. I later identified the bigger ants as Formica glacialis, and the smaller ants, unmistakable as Pheidole because of the shape and size of their heads, as Pheidole pilifera