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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 11, 2019 16:23:08 GMT
The fungus somehow fell over again. This time I'll probably leave it as it is, since when they start building it upwards again it'll have a much wider, more stable base. And for a better sense of scale:
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 11, 2019 19:29:49 GMT
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Post by 1moldavite on Mar 11, 2019 22:48:00 GMT
I am amazed by how big the Queen is compared to the workers.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 12, 2019 1:03:28 GMT
I am amazed by how big the Queen is compared to the workers. The only other species I can currently think of with such dramatic size differences between queen and workers are Carebara diversa and Carebara castanea.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 12, 2019 16:00:37 GMT
Today, shallow raised dark ridges made from chewed up leaves are already crisscrossing over the surface of the fungus garden as the colony begins to build it up vertically again. Unfortunately although they have taken many chunks out of the daffodil, they have all been dumped on the trash pile. Leafcutters as I mentioned are supposed to have a varied rotation of food but mine throw out anything that aren't the usual leaves or apple slices... A large pile of brood has been arranged on the surface. The particularly vigilant person might even be able to spot the small number of eggs hidden amongst it!
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Post by Black Ant on Mar 13, 2019 18:18:41 GMT
Looking good
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 15, 2019 16:26:05 GMT
Progress is still going nicely. The foragers are usually quite leisurely when cutting fresh leaves, but as the leaves get older they start cutting them with greater urgency, as though to take what they still can. They're already going to need more within a day or so! The fungus is still making steady progress. You can see that they're already constructing the ceilings on some new chambers, although they haven't yet started to build around that big exposed brood pile. I've seen plenty of callow workers on and near the brood pile! Very cute. And the queen is still laying eggs!
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Post by Wood~Ant on Mar 15, 2019 17:02:49 GMT
Nice to see the colony is growing and getting established. Lovely to see the brood developing and the callow ants. I have to admit that you're doing so well with this brilliant specialist ant species, and better than I expected for an ant keeper with no previous experience of leaf cutters. TenebrousNova
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 15, 2019 18:13:13 GMT
Nice to see the colony is growing and getting established. Lovely to see the brood developing and the callow ants. I have to admit that you're doing so well with this brilliant specialist ant species, and better than I expected for an ant keeper with no previous experience of leaf cutters. TenebrousNova Honestly? I expected this colony to miserably fail and die back in November after a handful of journal posts. Although the colony will get more difficult to house and feed as it grows (They can have millions of workers in the wild and the appetite of an adult cow!) they seem to be doing just fine in a rather simple tank, despite a few mishaps here and there. All I have to do is water the substrate every few days and replace their leaves and clean them out once a week. I've read all of our old leaf cutter journals (Which gave me ideas), but one day I'd love to see another person here try keeping them so I can read about their experiences. I assumed that you'd need to keep them in an immensely complicated set up but I watched a few videos, most notably AntsBrazil's Atta sexdens videos (I highly recommend watching them!), and spoke to a Brazilian friend on Discord who keeps Acromyrmex, who gave me lots of advice. Chris from Antsrus was also very encouraging. The colony is of course still tiny and there's always the chance that things will go wrong, but I feel much more confident now than I first did.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 18, 2019 16:31:24 GMT
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 26, 2019 2:31:28 GMT
As you can see, those brood piles from the last update are now almost entirely covered up by a ceiling of fungus. What I would give to have an endoscope like they use in documentaries to get internal footage of ant nests! I'd love to see how elaborate the fungus's internal structure is and how much brood lies within. There's usually at least 100-150 workers on the surface but there's probably just as many workers inside. It isn't all good news though: I've been noticing the occasional worker running around on the floor and on close inspection of the lid, found they'd chewed a small hole in the mesh. I've covered it up but as the colony grows this sort of thing will happen more often, especially since Atta cephalotes can chew through tougher materials such as plastic.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Mar 29, 2019 17:02:29 GMT
Things have been eventful today. I woke up to find 30 workers charging around outside their tank and finally figured out how they escaped: they decided to enter the tube to their unused foraging tank for the first time and happened to find the one part of the lid I'd forgotten to put mesh over! Unfortunately the fungus has shrunk a bit. It could need more food or it could be because it's already getting warmer where I am. Just in case, I lowered their thermostat by 1 degree to 25C. However, I think it will recover. In any case, the colony has been very aggressive lately! This media worker caught hold of my finger and would not let go. You can pull most ants off you when they bite, but these leafcutters hold on very tightly, much as they would when cutting a leaf. On days like this it's all I can do to poke the workers swarming up the sides back down so I can close the lid. Since they've actually discovered the foraging tank now, I decided to put some leaves in it. To attempt to train them to use this tank for its intended purpose (And not as an escape route!), I placed a small group of workers in there and closed the lid. All they have to do to pass this test is find the tube, enter it and tell their sisters on the other side about the great bounty they discovered. I've found a new favourite food for them: daisies! They immediately started to pluck the petals off and bring them to the fungus garden. I never thought they'd like them, but I'm glad to be proven wrong since they're very common flowers. This was taken about ten minutes after I put the new vegetation in. They certainly didn't waste any time.
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Post by TenebrousNova on Apr 7, 2019 14:42:19 GMT
Despite my efforts the fungus has now shrunk to about half of its size. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Hopefully things can turn back around?
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Post by Wood~Ant on Apr 7, 2019 15:43:09 GMT
Despite my efforts the fungus has now shrunk to about half of its size. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Hopefully things can turn back around? Do you think that there could have been weed killer on the daisies?
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Post by TenebrousNova on Apr 7, 2019 16:07:46 GMT
Despite my efforts the fungus has now shrunk to about half of its size. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Hopefully things can turn back around? Do you think that there could have been weed killer on the daisies? Weed killer is certainly a possibility but I don't think it came from the daisies, which I picked in a local forest. Perhaps you're right and I just need to be more careful where I get their plants from. Some plants, such as mint, also produce a natural fungicide and in my experimentation I could've chosen something harmful.
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