Ants Sharing a Nest?

This was quite a surprise for me: I was observing a Trachymyrmex septentrionalis ant colony foraging and doing nest maintenance. I wanted to get some photos to share with folks. As I observed and took photos, I saw Solenopsis ants (fire ants) coming in and out of this nest. They stopped and interacted with the Trachymyrmex ants using their antennae and then entered the nest freely.

I collected some of the Solenopsis ants and brought them back to the lab to identify -- I was hoping these were Solenopsis xyloni, our native fire ant, and not S. invicta, the red imported fire ant. They are S. xyloni.

I alerted my friend Jon Seal, a professor and myrmecologist (ant biologist) at University of Texas-Tyler about this. Jon is an expert on Trachymyrmex. Jon has seen this kind of interaction as well but does not know if there is more to it. He thinks perhaps they just ignore each other. However, this kind of interaction rarely happens in ants. Different species typically avoid one another or interact aggressively. But as with many things in ants, we have been thinking they mostly act aggressively but are beginning to find situations in which this is not the case. I am wondering if there may be more to this -- but I'll let Jon look into that and I'll stick to figuring out about the Comanche harvester ant, they don't seem to be aggressive even among Comanche colonies...

In my first post, I mentioned the Ants of Texas Research group -- I should have been more clear. The Ants of Texas is a group of real myrmecologists, mostly at universities, who study ants for a living (so to speak). We just came together this past Spring (2013) to begin setting up a website and brainstorming on ways to approach this project. It is a long term goal to construct a good species list. Because most land in Texas is private, it is also difficult to sample ants. Please contact me (amayo@uta.edu) if you are interested -- you could send us ant specimens from your property for example. Thanks for your consideration.

Posted on July 24, 2013 02:14 AM by littleant