New ants

Two Christmases ago I got O an Antworks and a couple of months later we got the ants we ordered from the UK. These were tiny little things though, about 25 arrived in a plastic container the size of a film roll canister. They lived their 3 month lifespans and for the last year the Antworks has been collecting dust with a pile of dead ants in it that we didn't bother to clean out.

O finally got around to ordering new ants, bigger ones this time from a place in the Netherlands. And bigger they are, at least 4 times larger than the last ones. We only got 10, in a plastic tub. They came yesterday evening and then we had to try to get these big, hyper things into the Antworks box. With the small ants, if a couple died in the process of transferring them, it was no big loss, but this time we only had 10 and they cost a euro each. The first attempt got out of control with the ants running under the lid and onto the table and we had to close up everything again and stick them in the fridge to calm them down. The second attempt went a bit more smoothly and soon all 10 were in the box. Whew. One was lost in the procedure, it was lying in the box curled up and barely moving, and when it did move, it didn't look too healthly. O called it "the gimp" and eventually took it out. So we only have 9 now.

What's great about them being bigger is that you can see their body parts more. You can easily see their large mandibles and their antennae and the segments of their bodies. I learned only a couple of weeks ago via the Straight Dope that ants are actually one of the cleanest animals on earth. They secrete stuff to kill bacteria and they are constantly grooming themselves. You can really see that with these ants; they seem to stop every 10 seconds or so to run their front legs over their antennae and then they lick their legs with their germ-killing saliva. Occasionally they stop to do a more thorough cleaning of their whole body, curling up in a ball to reach their back end and back legs.

The smaller ants were known to not be the most productive. They huddled in the corner of the box for most of the first week we had them and only dug one large tunnel and a little one off in the corner. It wasn't the maze of tunnels all through the box that we imagined. The bigger ants though have gotten right down to work. Here's a photo O took of the main tunnel the smaller ants dug, though it did end up a bit larger than this (it curved back up to the surface). Here though is what the box looked like only a couple of hours ago.



So far they've mostly been widening out the tunnels that were already there, but they also connected the small tunnel that was to the left to the main one the other ants had dug. There's tons of displaced gel bits on the surface, a whole new mountain up there. To the left side they've cleaned out a lot of the gel against the side of the box, I'm not sure why. It's more of a big hole than a tunnel. Still, there are a few connecting tunnel bits and holes, and it's fun to watch them crawl through it.

With the bigger ants, you can see much better what they do to dig the gel out. They bite off a few bits of the gel and then roll it back under their body to make one bigger ball of the stuff. Then they pick that up and haul it up to the surface. Where they put the bit down seems totally random, but maybe there's an ant system to it. Of course they wouldn't want to put it all right outside of the hole they come out of or else it would end up blocking the hole, but they seem to wander around trying to find the perfect spot to leave the lump they have. Anyway, they've done so much work just overnight, it'll be interesting to see how they get on over the next few days.