Wild About Ants » Ant Books

Bees, Wasps, and Ants: The Indispensable Role of Hymenoptera in Gardens

Roberta — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:40:32 +0000

What is there to do when the ants are not very active outside? Read a book about ants, of course. I just finished Bees, Wasps, and Ants: The Indispensable Role of Hymenoptera in Gardens by Eric Grissell, which James Trager had mentioned a few weeks ago (Thank you, James!)

Grissell is an expert on wasps and he writes with a great deal of humor, so this is an interesting read. Although it is geared to the popular audience, and gardeners in general, there’s plenty to please the entomologist as well. I definitely benefited from a brush up on the sawflies, which I hadn’t spent much time on in awhile.

Starting out with an overview of the Order Hymenoptera, what groups make it up and what their economic impact is, Grissell then goes into detail about each group. He calls the sawflies “cows,” the parasitoids “police,” predatory wasps “wolves,” bees are “pollinators, of course, and ants are “recyclers.”

I found his take on the ants to be quite amusing. “The main trouble with ants is, well, basically they all look like ants…” (p. 237). This is from a man who studies parasitoids! Anyway, this may explain why Figure 131 on page 256 is labeled Formica. Just sayin’… (Actually those things often happen in the editorial process.)

Anyway, I did find this view insightful because I have made a New Year’s resolution to figure out our local Pogonomyrmex, and I have to say right now I have a lot of photographs of reddish-orange ants that all look alike: blurry.

Seriously though, Grissell laments that when gardeners talk of adding wildlife to the garden, they always concentrate on birds and butterflies. Perhaps this book will convince more people to tolerate, if not actively encourage, the bees, wasps and ants.

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Timber Press (June 30, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0881929883
ISBN-13: 978-0881929881

New Ant Book for Children

Roberta — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:22:15 +0000

Today let’s take a look at a children’s book about ants with suggestions for accompanying hands-on activities.

Look Inside an Ant Nest (Pebble Plus: Look Inside Animal Homes) by Megan Nicole Cooley Peterson is a straightforward nonfiction book that explores the unseen world of an ant nest. Laid out with large color photographs on the right side page and simple sentences with controlled, subject-specific vocabulary on the left, it is perfect for the beginning reader (first grade reading level). The large size also makes it easy to hold up and read in front of a group of young children. One of the photographs is by Alex Wild, the rest are from stock sources.

Suggested activities to accompany the book:

1. Ant life cycle

Gather:

Construction paper
Crayons and or markers
Photographs of ant eggs, ant larvae, ant pupae, ant workers, and ant queens (see links below)

Have the children draw each stage, keeping in mind:

Only the queen lays the eggs in most cases. (how to tell if the ant is a queen)
The larvae are legless and resemble a comma or crochet hook in shape (more photos of larvae.)
The eggs are smaller than the workers; the pupae are the same size as the workers or larger. (Is it an egg or a pupa?)
Pupae are sometimes covered with a silken bag called a cocoon and sometimes not, depending on the ant species.
Adult ants emerge from the pupae. Worker pupae are the same size as the workers. Queen and male pupae are larger than the average worker.

For older children, let them construct the life cycle in 3D, for example using marshmallow ants.

2. Ant nests

Dr. Walter Tschinkel has modified a technique for looking at the structure of ant nests by pouring dental plaster or various metals, such as aluminum, into the tunnels, allowing it to dry and then digging up the nest. This gives a negative-space impression of some truly impressive ant nests.

This amazing video shows how it is done by experts. (Do not try this at home).

More about Dr. Walter Tschinkel’s Ant Castles can be found at the Florida State University. He’s says that the ants can build the huge one at the bottom in just five days!

Suggestions:

1. Draw pictures of some of Walter Tschinkel’s amazing ant nest casts. Label the chambers and tunnels.

2. For older students: Design and draw plans for an underground home for humans. What would be the advantages of living underground? What might some of the problems be? Try drawing up your plans on Google Sketchup or a similar program.

Reading level: Ages 4 and up
Library Binding: 24 pages
Publisher: Capstone Press (August 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1429660783
ISBN-13: 978-1429660785

Book was provided by publisher for review purposes.

The City Under The Back Steps: A Children’s Book About Ants

Roberta — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 02:31:23 +0000

Are you interested in old books about ants? The City Under the Back Steps by Evelyn Sibley Lampman and illustrated by Honore Valintcourt is a children’s book about ants that was published in 1960. It is out of print, but you can buy a used copy (if you don’t mind paying quite a bit of money). The reason it is expensive is that it is actually a very good book.

The premise of the story is a boy and a girl are shrunken to the size of ants. Suddenly their back yard becomes a terrifying jungle full of dangers and wonders. They are taken underground into an ants’ nest where they meet the ants’ pet cricket, learn about the life cycles of ants and have a number of adventures. Think of the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids with a much more accurate representation of the life of the ants.

Thanks to my friend Robyn, I was able to listen to the book on CD. She had discovered that Chinaberry has set of CDs for $19.95. If you like stories that mix sweeping imagination with a great deal of detailed natural history, then you just might want to give it a try.

Have you ever seen this book?

Hardcover: 210 pages
Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (1960)
Language: English
ASIN: B0007E119S

Note: I have an affiliation with Amazon. If you click through this link and buy a book, I will receive a small commission. I have no affiliation with Chinaberry.

Antbirds and Ovenbirds by Alexander F. Skutch

Roberta — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:41:49 +0000

For our first July book review, let’s take a look at an older book that is not exactly about ants, but is related. At a recent stop at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology gift shop, I managed to snag a copy of Antbirds & Ovenbirds: Their Lives and Homes by Alexander F. Skutch. This book, which is currently out of print, was originally published by the University of Texas, Austin in 1996. Of course I was mostly interested in the antbirds.

What exactly are antbirds?

You may not have heard of these somewhat elusive birds that live mostly in the tropical forests of Central and South America. Antbirds are named for their habit of foraging alongside army ant swarms, mostly Eciton burchellii. They grab insects and other small creatures that scuttle, jump or fly up in an effort to try to avoid the approaching army ants. They do not feed extensively on the army ants themselves.

Antbirds are not easy to study. There are over 250 species in three families, and more are being discovered each year. The smallest of the antbirds are called antwrens. Other groups are the antvireos, antshrikes, antthrushes and antpittas, named for the colorful pitta birds of the Old World. Some have small crests, like our familiar Northern cardinal or blue jay. Most are striking mixes of reddish-brown, black, white and gray. Each has its own way of following the ants and exhibits different behaviors and food preferences.

Author Alexander Skutch was a naturalist who was born in the United States, but moved to Costa Rica and lived there until his death in 2004. Originally trained as a botanist (he obtained his doctorate in that field), he switched to studying the birds of Central and South America, including the antbirds. He wrote some 200 books on various aspects of bird biology, as well as other topics. Accompanying the text are black and white drawings by Dana Gardner.

In Antbirds & Ovenbirds, Skutch discusses the behavior of army ants, too, because it is what drives the birds. He addresses the nomadic phase and the static phase of the colony cycle. He also spends quite a bit of time dispelling the myths about the feeding habits of New World army ants. He gives examples of his own observations that show that antbirds are not in danger from the ants and that the New World army ants do not feed on vertebrates, even dead ones.

Stutch was a keen observer and has many interesting insights. Some of his narrative wanders a bit, but it is personal and charming. His account of a bicolored antbird that followed him in his travels through the forests over a series of months, capturing the arthropods Skutch kicked up, is both funny and heartwarming.

If you are interested in the natural history of unique birds or you are planning a trip to the tropics, then you might want to take a look at this book. Although out of print, through the wonders of modern technology you can find an excerpt at Google Books and you can download an electronic copy at Powell’s (for a fee), as well as find used copies for sale.

For more information on antbirds and army ants, try:

The Army Ant Entourage at Myrmecos

Photographs and information about antbirds in the family Thamnophilidae

Photographs and information about antpittas of the family Grallariidae

Other books by Alexander F. Skutch:

The Fire Ants: Chapters 13-15

Roberta — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:11:05 +0000

Although I set an ambitious goal of Chapters 13-16, as you could probably gather, it took more time then I expected to digest the information in Chapters 13-15. Let’s take a look at those chapters and save Chapter 16 for next week.

(For those of you jumping in late, we are discussing The Fire Ants by Dr. Walter Tschinkel by going over a few chapters per week. Click “The Fire Ants Book Discussion” category for related posts.)

Chapter 13. Another way for a queen to take over a colony

In addition to the drama of incipient colony foundation by independent queens discussed in the last post, Solenopsis invicta colonies have yet another way to gain reproductive success. Mature colonies produce a second set of reproductives in the fall, which overwinter in the nest. The overwintered females fly in early spring, under much different conditions than reproductives reared in the spring. The overwintered females try to take over established colonies that have lost their own queen, or have become orphaned. If they are not successful, the overwintered females are incapable of starting a colony of their own and simply perish. Tschinkel calls this type of behavior “dependent colony founding,” apparently because the queen depends on the presence of orphaned mature colonies to be successful (?).

The overwintering females may also take over their own natal nest if their mother dies. In this case they do not mate, and produce only males. In orphaned colonies with overwintering females, 86% had unmated sisters for their queen, whereas 14% had queens that had stolen in from other colonies. When no overwintering females were present in the orphaned colonies, 62% had unrelated queens and 38% percent had sisters (top of page 189). I did wonder where those sisters came from if there were no overwintering females. Any thoughts?

Tschinkel reaches the conclusion that Solenopsis invicta is a “weedy species” because independently founding queens are much more successful in sites lacking competing mature colonies. Only 3% of colonies showed evidence of dependent founding. In contrast, Solenopsis geminata had a much higher success rate of dependent queen founding, with up to a third of colonies showing evidence of that type of founding.

What do you think of the technique of using match-mated females to determine the success of dependent founding queens?

Chapter 14. Colony Growth

How do you keep track of how an ant colony grows? In the case of Solenopsis invicta, you can start with even-aged cohorts by opening a new area to colonization. To get a count of number of workers, Markin drove a large cylinder into the soil around a fire ant colony and then slowly flooded out the workers. Tschinkel developed a method for sampling soil and ants from a colony during excavation. It is tedious and difficult work, which explains why so few of these types of studies have been undertaken.

The results suggest a colony on rough average reaches maturity around four years (and lives up to eight years), with around 200,000 workers.

As with individual organisms, temperature and the amount/quality of food available determined how fast a colony grew in laboratory conditions.

Did you find any points particularly interesting for this chapter? Anything I skipped over that you would like to discuss?

Chapter 15. Another aspect of colony growth: What types of ants are produced and when?

When a colony grows, it changes in composition as well as in worker number. The incipient colony starts out with tiny minims. Over time, workers of a range of sizes are added. Eventually the colony begins to produce reproductives.

Fire ants, in this case S. xyloni, have a range of worker sizes.

How much energy does a colony allocate to each type of ant? Tschinkel estimates, based on worker mortality, that a average fire ant queen produces 2.74 million workers during her lifetime. The colony’s reproductive success depends on optimally allocating resources between workers and reproductives. Too many workers, and the colony loses opportunities to reproduce. If there are too many alates, there won’t be enough workers to feed them all.

As a colony grows and becomes mature, a higher percentage of the workers are the large or major workers. He only briefly mentions juvenile hormone as a possible mechanism in the switch to larger workers, as well as level of food.

Do you know of any recent research that sheds more light on this topic?

Tschinkel also disscusses how the nest grows with colony size and how the size of the colony’s territory changes as well. He ends with a summary of how the colony ends, which he describes as resulting from the queen likely running out of sperm and thus being no longer able to produce replacement workers or female alates.

Do you have any comments on Chapter 15?

Interlude: The Porter Wedge Micrometer

A device for measuring 200 head widths of ants in one hour? Sounds like a dream come true. What do you think of Tschinkel’s idea that it has been slow to catch on due to “cultural viscosity?” I admit I did it the old-fashioned way, but I pinned all my specimens first. Now that was tedious!

Have you tried a wedge micrometer? How do you measure your ant head widths?

Let’s try to cover Chapters 16 and 17 this week, with the Interludes (up to page 271). Is anyone further along than that? Let us know, and I’ll try to move ahead more quickly.

Some chapters/text of The Fire Ants is available online at Google Books.

The Fire Ants: Chapters 10-12

Roberta — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 13:33:28 +0000

Do you agree that 10-12 are the best chapters yet?

Chapter 10 covers mating swarms and colony foundation by new queens.

In many ways Solenopsis invicta follows the classic ant colony foundation script, at least at first. Males and unmated queens are produced in spring and hang around in the nest until conditions are right. Mating flights are triggered the day after there is a locally heavy rain. The workers start to mill around while the males and unmated queens fly from the nest. After mating, the queens fly some distance (from monogyne nests) and then land at a suitable location to start a new colony. For the males, it is a dead end trip. The mating swarms occur most frequently in May and June, but can take place in any month if conditions are right. Not all the reproductives leave in any one swarming event.

A fire ant queen prefers to land on a roadside or recently disturbed land, although she sometimes ends up in a parking lot (see Interlude below) or swimming pool. If the local conditions are suitable upon landing, the queen immediately removes her wings. She searches for a place to begin digging and prepares a hole by removing soil with her mandibles. She creates a chamber and crawls inside for a typical claustral, or closed inside a chamber, founding.

Here in Arizona, both ants and termites are sometimes induced to swarm by sprinkler irrigation. Tschinkel indicates that fire ants can also be induced to swarm artificially by applying water.

Have you ever seen fire ants swarming?

(Photograph by April Nobile / © AntWeb.org / CC-BY-SA-3.0 from Wikimedia.)

Chapter 11. Claustral Founding

Once the newly mated queen loses her wings, the proteins from the wing muscles begin to deteriorate and, with the storage proteins and fats already residing in her body, are used to fuel the development of eggs. She lays 20 to 100 eggs in the first week, some which are trophic eggs that serve as food for the larvae when they hatch. The queen cares for the eggs, larvae and pupae until the first workers emerge. The first workers are always extra small workers called “minims.”

Now come the interesting part, where fire ants begin to diverge from the traditional ant colony founding script.

Upon landing, some of the queens form founding associations with other queens. Tschinkel was able to show that this behavior was density dependent, meaning the more queens in a given area, the more queens founding in groups. He was also able to show that a pre-formed hole of the proper depth and dimensions was highly attractive to fire ant queens. (Cool!)

Queens that found in groups tend to produce fewer minims per individual, but also weigh more at the end of the claustral period. Weighing more has an advantage during the next stage.

Interlude: What do you think about the essay “Sharon’s House of Beauty?” Why do you think the fire ants are attracted to such a site?

Chapter 12. Brood Raiding

Now the script becomes more like one for “Desperate Housewives.” Once the minims have emerged and the many incipient nests are opened to the world, the tiny colonies begin a process that results in only one nest with one queen.

As soon as the minim workers are active, the queens of nests with multiple queens start to fight. Over time one queen wins by dominating the brood pile. Often she’s the heaviest queen. Others are pushed away, where they are more likely to be attacked and killed by workers. The result is a nest with one queen.

At the same time, the minim workers may wander from incipient nest to incipient nest. The minims do not fight with minims of other colonies, as would be the case for larger workers from more established colonies. Eventually workers from colonies with a larger number of minims act like very rude guests, pick up brood from other nests they visit and bring it back to their own. The minims from the raided nest may go retrieve their sisters and take them back to their initial nest. The workers from the competing nests may go back and forth for a time. but eventually one colony wins and all the minims and brood end up in the winning nest. Then the raiding begins in another nest, until all in a given area are combined into one. Tschinkel recalls one raiding series where 80 incipient colonies consolidated into just two.

As Tschinkel points out, the behavior of minims of abandoning their own mother to join another unrelated queen seems to fly in the face of evolutionary theory. His suggestion is that because the abandoned queen tends to move to the winning colony where, if she is able, she joins the colony and may eventually take over, the minims have a small chance of having their mother be the winning queen even if they leave their natal nest.

What do you think of this period in the colony founding process? What about the idea that the minims are moving because of the small chance their mother might win? Wouldn’t it make sense that the minims would stay with their sister brood rather than their mother because they are more closely related to their sisters than their mother?

Any other questions or comments?

How about reading Chapters 13-16 next?

The Strange and Wonderful World of Ants, an App for Children

Roberta — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 21:01:57 +0000

To get away from the heavy book for adults we’ve been reading, let’s take a look at a new App about ants for children.

Do you have an iPad? If not, then this post probably isn’t going to mean much to you. If you do own an iPad, however, and have children who might be interested in ants, then read on.

The world of apps has been taken by storm by The Strange and Wonderful World of Ants by Amos Latteier with illustrations by Melinda Matson. You can see screenshots at the app website.

Follow your tour guide, E.O. the Ant (Okay, that bit is stretching it) through the world of ants at three different reading levels.

Right now everyone is talking about it.

I’m not an expert at apps yet, so for reviews see:

IEAR.org

Digital storytime review

Moms with Apps

The Strange and Wonderful World of Ants is available through the iTunes app store for iPad.
Price: $3.99
Ideal ages 7 – 12 (Middle grade)

The Fire Ants – Book Review

Roberta — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 01:31:53 +0000

Last month some of you indicated that you would be interested in discussing The Fire Ants by Walter Tschinkel. Take a look at the review and if it would be something you’d like to participate in, be sure to leave a comment with your answers to the questions at the bottom of this post. And now for the book review:

The Fire Ants by Walter Tschinkel is the kind of book that blasts through stereotypes. You would think a book with over 700 pages about a single topic, and fire ants at that, would be pretty dreadful reading. Surprise! The Fire Ants has all the elements of a great literary work. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry. Walter Tschinkel turns out to be a scientist with a talent for writing far more than just straight research papers. As E.O. Wilson says in the Foreword, “He has delivered a masterpiece.”

Dr. Tschinkel starts with a prelude essay about how others react when he reveals he studies fire ants for a living. He concludes, “we all do funny things for a living.” The essay sets the tone for the others that follow. He then jumps right to the heart of the matter. “I love fire ants,” he says at the start of the first chapter. It is that passion which makes this book the important and enjoyable read it is.

To make his quick overview of fire ant biology in the first chapter more concrete, Tschinkel takes the reader on a mental field trip to a fire ant research site, shoveling up facts with clumps of imaginary ants. He then delves into the history of the introduction and spread of Solenopsis richteri and then Solenopsis invicta fire ants throughout the southern United States. It is a sad history that shows what can happen when an eradication program is launched without a glimmer of understanding of the target organisms.

In Section II, Tschinkel discusses first the basic needs of a fire ant colony and then the life cycle of a monogyne colony (an ant colony with a single queen laying all the eggs). As an aside, Walter Tschinkel is probably best known by the public for his studies of ant nest structure. He has filled underground ant nests of different species with materials such as dental plaster, allowed the materials to harden, and then dug out the resulting form. In this section he writes an essay about transforming the empty spaces in the ants’ nest into something concrete. His ideas may be difficult to grasp for some, but even if you have no knowledge of ant biology, the shapes are intriguing things of beauty. (Take a look at Walter’s Ant Castles.)

In another essay called “Mundane Methods,” Tschinkel writes about the less-than-glamorous techniques scientists invent to get the job done. Many parts of this essay, particularly the part about the miracle ant containment compound Fluon, are just plain laugh-out-loud hilarious. With over 35 years of fire ant research to draw from, he has more than a few tricks for handling fire ants.

In Section III, Tschinkel shares the basics of fire ant family life, such as how fire ants recognize their nestmates, how jobs are allocated, and how food is shared. He also delves into the part of the fire ant that most people are most acutely aware of, the sting of the fire ant, as well as the chemical properties of its venom and its uses. He concludes fire ant venom is a nasty cocktail but other ants and wasps have much worse stings when it comes to pain. A small proportion of the human population is allergic to fire ants stings, however, and for those individuals even a single sting can potentially be fatal without immediate medical care.

Moving on, the author devotes several chapters in Section IV to the discovery of polygyny in fire ants, and goes into fascinating detail how fire ants perform brood raids between competing incipient colonies until one colony ends up with all the brood and is the winner. These detailed studies are the type that can only emerge after years of observations, experiments and a profound understanding of the organism.

The final section is a a wrap-up of population studies and ecology, including how Solenopsis invicta colonies interact with their environment, with other ant species, with other arthropods, and with vertebrates. The section on decomposer communities, starting on page 602, is a review of some of the pastureland research. Tschinkel writes, “Because dung and the community of insects exploiting it age rather quickly, the researchers hung around pastures to watch the cows defecate (need a job?)” The writing deteriorates from there (pun intended). But what would you expect from a man whose program is called the “Fire Ant Research Team”?

In The Fire Ants, Walter Tschinkel delivers an insightful and educational overview of the current status of scientific research on one species of ant. That he can keep the reader interested, and inject some well-placed levity, shows he has much to teach us about the communication of scientific ideas as well.

Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (April 15, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0674022076
ISBN-13: 978-0674022072

If you think you’d like to participate in a reading and discussion of this book, please leave a comment with your answers to the following:

Do you have access to a copy of The Fire Ants to read?

Because the book is so long, I assume we would read about 3-4 chapters per week at most. Does that seem reasonable?

As for the discussion format,

Do you want me to put together summaries of and questions for that week’s chapter(s) in a blog post and you can respond in the comments? (I assuming one discussion post per week).
Would everyone like to blog their own summaries of that week’s chapters and then send the URL’s here for a “link carnival?”
Or we could start a Yahoo group?

I’m sure we won’t be able to accommodate everyone’s preferences, but I would like to make this as enjoyable as possible. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Final note: I get about a gazillion spam messages per day on this particular blog. If your comments go to spam, I may not find them. Please try again or e-mail me if your comments don’t appear in a day.

The Fire Ants Book

Roberta — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:17:54 +0000

Related to the last post about Southern fire ants, have you seen The Fire Ants by Walter R. Tschinkel?

You would think that a book that is over 700 pages long about a single topic, and fire ants at that, would be pretty dreadful reading. Surprise! The Fire Ants has all the elements of a great literary work. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry. Walter Tschinkel turns out to be a scientist with a talent for writing far more than just straight research papers. As E.O. Wilson says in the Foreword, “He has delivered a masterpiece.”

I have been thinking about reviewing The Fire Ants for several months, but wasn’t sure how to tackle it because there is so much to discuss. It would be a huge post.

What would you think about taking a few chapters at a time and having a discussion? Any interest?

Let me know what you think.

The Leafcutter Ants Book

Roberta — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:22:45 +0000

My copy of The Leafcutter Ants by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson came today.

I had to laugh. The blurb on the back starts out: “The Leafcutter Ants is the most detailed and authoritative description of any ant species ever produced.” This is a skimpy book. At 160 pages, it is about the size of your standard paperback. Comparing it to Walter Tschinkel’s hefty 723 page tome on the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, I figure it must be the authoritative part they are referring to…

The authors state that the book was inspired by the chapter on leafcutter ants from their book The Superorganism. This book definitely includes some of the same photographs and figures as the chapter, but they have added more spectacular photographs, including a few by Alex Wild at Myrmecos.

I can’t wait to delve into it further to see what’s new.

Are you reading The Leafcutter Ants yet? What do you think?

By the way, Alex Wild found a cool video about leafcutter ants at his blog.

Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Original edition (November 15, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0393338681
ISBN-13: 978-0393338683