Volume 41, Number 1, January 1995:
Collection and Maintenance of Ants
and
Studying Ants: A Beginning
by Mark B. DuBois

Text-only version

ISSUE HOME PAGE

ABOUT THIS ISSUE
- about KSN
- about the author

IN THIS ISSUE
- introduction
- collection
- maintenance, observation ant farm
- maintenance, classroom use
- project observations
- literature cited
- books for children on ants

Studying Ants: A Beginning
by Mark B. DuBois
- males, queens and worker ants
- establishing a colony
- caring for young
- growth of an ant colony
- ant senses
- gardening ants
- harvester ants
- parasitic ants
- acrobat ants
- army ants
- questions, activities and investigations with ants
- further reading

SLIDESHOW
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Collection and Maintenance of Ants to Use for Teaching
by Roger D. Akre, Laurel D. Hansen, and Elizabeth A. Myhre

and

Studying Ants: A Beginning
by Mark B. DuBois

ESTABLISHING A COLONY

In the Midwest, most queen ants establish their colonies alone. They shed their wings after a nuptial flight, dig a chamber in the soil or in rotten wood, and lay their first eggs. While her offspring are developing, the queen obtains nourishment by metabolizing her flight muscles. She survives on this and on accumulated fat reserves until her young have developed into adult workers and begin bringing food into the colony. The queen often lays infertile eggs which she feeds to her developing larvae. Because of the reduced food supply, the first workers are often quite small and called nanitics. They emerge from their nest and begin foraging for food. Since queens have limited reserves, they must rear workers rapidly and successfully the first time.

CARING FOR YOUNG

Ants pass through life stages: egg, several larval stages, a pupal stage and the adult. Ant eggs are extremely small, usually less than 0.5 mm. When nests are disturbed, the larger oval "eggs" ants are seen carrying are actually the pupae. Ant larvae are often covered with "hairs" which cause them to stick to each other. In more primitive species, the workers deliver the larvae to their food; in the more advanced species, the workers bring the food to the larvae. In both cases, workers tend to move larvae within the nest. Since many species have the "hairs" mentioned above, a single worker can move several larvae at once.

GROWTH OF AN ANT COLONY

Ant colonies usually undergo three stages of growth: a founding stage, an exponential growth stage, and a maturity stage. Behaviors of workers differ during these growth stages. In a new nest, the smaller nanitics forage immediately after emerging from the pupal stage. Their colony is being established and it is imperative to locate nourishment rapidly (once the queen has exhausted her body reserves, the colony would starve without outside sources of food). In older colonies, when workers emerge from the pupal stage, they spend most of their time in activities within the nest, caring for developing young, tending the queen, housecleaning, and constructing new tunnels. Older workers are usually the ones to venture outside the nest, except for nanitic workers in new nests. It is these older workers who are the first to defend their nest from predators and competing colonies. Ant colonies fight their territorial disputes or "wars" using mostly old females.

Figure 1. Trachymyrmex septentrionalis, body, lateral view. Legs removed.