Oh man! You guys will totally find what I managed to capture this week,
a bit of an oddity. It’s a queen ant, but not just any queen ant. This, ladies and gentlemen,
is the strangest queen ant I’ve ever seen in my life!
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So as I was overseeing the construction of our future Ant House,
which by the way, as an update is still under construction
and should be done in a few more months, I felt a little tickle on my arm, and boom!
I found this. Have a look at her!
From afar, one might not even realize this is an ant, let alone a queen ant. To the
average eye, she could very well easily be mistaken for some other long insect,
perhaps a rove beetle or black larva of some sort, but AC Family, we know better.
Behold, the queen ant I managed to catch from our very own lands of Antopia. Isn’t she stunning?
So I’ll tell you what I know about her species in just a sec,
but do stay tuned until the end as I will be needing your opinions on something regarding
this queen ant, as well as, share with you some not so great news that happened this week,
which is relevant to this ant, as well as the marauder ants you saw in last week’s video,
and many other ant species featured on this channel. You’ll see what I mean, later.
But back to our new queen.
The first thing you might notice is this queen ant’s very unique,
slender body shape. There’s a reason why her species has this unique body shape,
and you’ll see why later. But her slender form is what gives her species their name.
She is what is known as a ‘Slender Ant’ from the genus Tetraponera.
I just love her shape, from her rectangular head with huge oval alien-like eyes,
slender thorax with her wing scars, which are indicators that she is indeed a queen,
her elongated skinny waist segment known as the petiole,
and her long thin gaster which ends at a point, and you guessed it - she’s got a stinger in there.
Which is why the moment I spotted her crawling on my arm I was careful not to cup her
or make her feel threatened. I’ve never been stung by a slender ant before,
nor was I willing to find out if and how much slender ant stings hurt.
She was actually quite cooperative and crawled happily into this test tube setup to settle in.
Now, here’s the thing about this queen ant though. Because of her thin gaster, I suspected she was
what is called a semi-claustral species, meaning during the period when she founds her colony,
she still hunts for food, unlike claustral species
of ants like our carpenter ants that naturally have large gasters,
that fast completely without food for the entire 2 month period of the colony founding process.
There were times when I spotted this queen pacing around the test tube, which to me meant
she was probably looking for some food, and so AC Family, let’s feed her Royal Highness, shall we?
I grabbed some mango-flavoured ant jelly.
I think she’ll really love this. I pulled the cotton blocker to her test tube,
placed in a small blob using a toothpick, and plugged the test tube back up.
AC Family, let’s watch. I think she could instantly smell the jelly nearby.
And it wasn’t long before she found our jelly offering and dove in for a drink. Mmmm… Awesome!
I noticed her taking a few test tastes of the jelly at different
locations of the blob. How neat to see her thinking in this way.
Oops! She slipped and it threw off a bit, but don’t worry she came back!
As she fed from the jelly I could really appreciate the stunning details of her exoskeleton
and design of her body. Look at how smooth she is, and the short yet streamlined shape of her legs.
Now as mentioned, there’s a reason her body is shaped like this, and to understand why,
we’ll need to go back to Antopia.
The forest towards the back of Antopia, i.e. our Ant House property, is full of
intertwining dead and decaying branches, and this is prime habitat of slender ants.
Slender ants are perfectly adapted to the fast-paced life
on dead branches which form their trails like slender ant highways.
The ants actually live inside the branches emerging from and entering their nest
at key holes within the wood. This is why slender ants have their unique stream-lined shape. They
need to fit within the narrow tunnels of their branch nests, which is a much tighter space
than is usually required for most other wood-nesting ant species like carpenter ants.
Though carpenter ants are about the same body length as these slender ants, there ain’t no way
carpenter ants could fit let alone cram an entire nest, into these thin branches, but slender ants
can, due to their thin perfectly adapted bodies! The lack of body hairs and having legs positioned
tighter to their body mean these slender ants can squeeze past each other problem-free.
But one of the coolest things about these slender ants is where they get their sugar! Look there!
These slender ants are milking honeydew from a mealybug, that whitish weird-looking round thing!
These ants tend mealybugs which act like “ant cows”, and the honeydew which is a bi-product
the mealybugs excrete, is an important sugary food source to the slender ants. Pretty cool right?
No wonder our new slender ant queen here has a sweet tooth!
Now at the start of the video, I mentioned I’d be needing your opinions regarding this queen ant,
and it’s this: First, now that you know all about her species, what should we name our new slender
ant queen? Leave your name suggestions for our queen in the comments, and I will choose my top
5 favourite for all of us to vote on in a future video! Let’s give her a cool name shall we? I
can’t wait to see if she’ll give us a slender ant colony, and if she does, my second question
to you guys is, how should we setup her ant farm? Should it be a terrarium of branches,
or perhaps something similar to our carpenter ant setup so we could still see inside the nest?
Let me know what you guys think! Though semi-claustral species are generally harder
to rear full colonies from, I’ll do my very best to rear a colony from her. Wish me luck, guys!
For those of you AC Family in North America, Central America, and South America, you may
find these slender ants look very similar to your native “twig ants” from the genus Pseudomyrmex,
and indeed, the two genera of ants live similar lifestyles,
only these slender ants are found in the Old World, specifically Africa, Madagascar, India,
south-east Asia and Australia. These slender ants are like the Old World version
of your twig ants. Pretty cool how two unrelated species can divergently
evolve in body shape simply by occupying the same lifestyle and niche in the ecosystem.
Which brings me now to the not so great news that happened this week.
It made headlines in my country that 375 ants were seized at the border illegally smuggled in
from Poland! They were mislabeled as “Lego Toy” parts. The moment I saw this, I immediately knew
this was for the ant keeping Black Market. It’s news like this that give ant keeping a bad rap.
Shipping in non-native ants directly endangers an ecosystem. Not only could these Polish ants
escape into my country and become invasive, should they befall into the hands of an irresponsible ant
keeper, but also who knows if these ants are carrying some kind of pathogen like a virus
that can jump into our local fauna, ants or otherwise? It’s a very bad situation all around.
The media called these ants, ‘black ants’, and I tried to look closer at images
and video footage of the seized ants, and my guess is they’re Messor barbarus queens,
a type of polymorphic seed-collecting harvester ant, which also happens to be a popular ant
species in the ant keeping hobby in Europe. This all just especially blows my mind, because
why would anyone want to import an ant species here, when as you’ve seen on the channel,
my country has a plethora of incredible species of ants, from these slender ants, to marauder ants,
to weaver ants, to trap-jaw ants, to even blue ants! Blue! Why, oh why ship in foreign ants?
Guess it comes to show you that sometimes people often want what they just don’t have,
but as I continued to watch our precious slender ant queen feeding peacefully on her jelly,
I realized just how important it is to not only appreciate that which we have, but also appreciate
them enough to not put our selfish desires before the safety of their species and those of
all interconnected life within the local ecosystem they belong to. To me, that’s the essence of ant
love, and why I realize that we ant keepers have a continued responsibility to promote the need
for ‘responsible ant keeping’, and that is, the keeping of only local ant species
caught from our yards. The bigger this hobby gets, the more critical this advocacy becomes.
Plus, keeping local ants inspires local conservation, which I think is a great thing.
And AC Family, speaking of which, if any of you ever need an ant colony or a queen ant with brood
to start ant keeping, we have a special page on our website at antscanada.com,
under the Queen Ants For Sale tab, which can help connect you with ant keepers from your
area who are selling local ant colonies only caught from your area. That way,
you can acquire local ants and not have to order them from another country or region.
I’ll leave a link in the description box for those of you looking for local ant colonies with
a queen. We’ve been proudly connecting local ant keepers with local ant colonies for over a decade
now, and it’s great for the hobby as well as fosters growing ant keeping communities globally.
Anyway, I have high hopes for our new queen slender ant and am excited to see if she’ll
successfully found a thriving slender ant colony. Let’s cross our fingers, and wish this queen we
found all the best! Well, actually, AC Family, because she landed on my arm, I like to fancy
that she found us. Thank you all for watching, and supporting the ants, guys. It’s ant love forever.