Post by angelicdefender on Aug 5, 2011 5:50:17 GMT
I know I've been posting a lot of my colonies in here, but that's because I didn't discover this place until a while back and I want to get all of these dead colonies out of my head and onto the web. My Pheidole pallidula colony died in an unexpected way. I was pretty sure that Pheidole pallidula (or Paladin ants, as I like to call them) was a polygynous ant species. I decided to try introducing a new queen to my dying colony, to up the worker population. Sure enough, over the course of a year, the Pheidole colony grew in size. However, there were a lot of flying ants around this time, and several had found themselves homes in my empty formicariums. A Tetramorium caespitum queen found my mom's flower pot to be a perfect nesting spot, and soon enough, I found my Paladin ants dying. I wasn't sure of the problem, as I watered and fed the ants. However, I soon discovered why. Tetramorium ants from the flower pot were constantly cutting off foraging Paladins, and stealing the food I fed them. Soon I started feeding both, but my Paladins were pretty aggressive. They started mass-producing soldiers, and somehow found a way out of my case. The Tetramorium ants were also putting up a fight, though in the end, the Tetramorium ants were killed (I saw my Paladins carrying the queen's carcass). However, because they fed the carcasses to their larvae, and that these Tetramorium ants were infected with some disease, my brood and workers soon started dying off. In the end, my queen was found dead, lying in her chamber with ants still grooming what they believed to be a fertile, alive, healthy queen.
