Ants at California Academy of Sciences

Ant-related Citizen Science Project

If you live in the San Francisco area and are interested in citizen science, you might want to check into the California Academy of Science’s Bay Area Ant Survey.

First you need to request an ant collecting kit from the Naturalist Center (see information at the link above). Then collect ants. When you are done, send your ant-filled vial and data sheet back to the Naturalist Center. Results will be uploaded to AntWeb and your contribution will become part of the scientific record. Cool!

If you are a teacher in the Bay area, and you would like your class to participate, ant collecting kits are available.

Leafcutter Ant Exhibit

Have you seen the leafcutter ant exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park? It is in the 4-story rainforest.

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The food is added in a clear plastic container.

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The ants then trail back a fake vine back to the nest display area.

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Leafcutter ants are cool to watch no matter what the circumstances.

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Don’t expect to get spectatcular photographs, however, because flash photography is prohibited.

These ant made the news recently when they managed to escape from their enclosure. Best-Laid Plans Fail to Trap Ants at Academy of Sciences by Jim Carlton gives the details. I’m not surprised, ants are very good at finding their way out of artificial nests. 🙂

I am always surprised, however, at what the fungus garden looks like. I guess I expect a fungus garden to look, well, moldy. Instead it looks like fresh, white cotton batting.

Here’s some pics from a different leafcutter ant exhibit:

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In this case the yellow is corn meal they are using as substrate for the fungus.

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Do you know if anyone has ever tried tasting it? Aren’t leafcutter ants amazing?

Honey Pot Ants

Honey or honey pot ants is a common name of a number of unrelated species with similar habits.

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Any idea what the yellow grape-like objects are hanging from the nest?

The honey ants are the camels of the ant family. They live in dry areas throughout the world, but particularly the deserts of Australia, where food and water may be scarce for long periods of time. To cope, honey ants have unique storage tanks for holding liquids. These storage tanks are special worker ants called repletes.

When times are good and food is abundant, the repletes drink the extra liquid food and swell up like balloons. Then they hang around, literally, from the ceiling of the nest, until times are tough. If the colony runs out of food, the other workers entice the repletes to spit up their reserves to share with the others. Having repletes is kind of like having liquid food in the bank.

Because of their name, honey ants are sometimes mistakenly thought to feed on sweets, but the repletes may also store fluid from animal prey. Dr. Bill Brown used to tell a story about how he and some other scientists were digging up a nest of honey pot ants. Having heard that people in the southwestern United States and Australia eat the swollen repletes filled with honeydew, the other scientists decided to taste a few. Dr. Brown declined however, because he had noticed nearby foraging ants were gathering fluids from dead earthworms.

Little Black Ant, Monomorium minimum

We have been inspired by books lately. In the last post, our inspiration was an adult-level book about katydids. Today it is the children’s picture book  Little Black Ant on Park Street by Janet Halfmann and Illustrated by Kathleen Rietz. The book is the next installment in the excellent Smithsonian’s Backyard series. I reviewed the book at my Wrapped in Foil blog and putting up related hands on activities for children on my Growing With Science blog, but here I’d like to take a look at the biology of the species.

The little black ant, Monomorium minimum, is a relatively tiny species, native to North America.

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Photograph by April Nobile / © AntWeb.org / CC-BY-SA-3.0

The workers are black, uniform in size and only about 1/16th of an inch long (1.5 mm). The petiole has two segments.

Monomorium minimum belongs to the tribe Solenopsdini. The workers have antennae with a three-segmented club. Their fire ant relatives have a two-segmented club.

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Photograph by April Nobile / © AntWeb.org / CC-BY-SA-3.0

(Ant head and profile from wikimedia)

Unlike the stereotypical ant colonies with only one queen, colonies of little black ants often contain multiple queens.

Monomorium minimum workers feed on honeydew, and scavenge dead insects and other arthropods, usually during the warmest part of the day. When foragers find a suitable item, they recruit nest mates by releasing a pheromone. Once recruited, groups of workers cut up larger items or cart away smaller ones.

As described in the book, when workers of M. minimum run into other ant species that scavenge dead arthropods, the minimum workers raise their gasters, vibrate and release poison gland secretions to chase away any rival ants. This behavior is called “gaster flagging.”

Here’s a short video of gaster flagging in another species.

For a little ant, they pack a big punch. Monomorium minimum colonies can invade imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, colonies and take over.

Given that these little ants are so interesting and relatively widespread and common, I’m surprised how little information I was able to find on them. Perhaps this new children’s book will spark some scientific inquiry by the next generation of myrmecologists.

Eldridge S. Adams and James F. A. Traniello. 1981. Chemical interference competition by Monomorium minimum (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Oecologia. Volume 51, Number 2 / January, 1981. pdf available

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