They are having sex all around you!

By they I mean ants, of course, it's nuptial flight season!  I wish knew how to remove the sound from the following video, my geeky-overexcited-10 year old voice is pretty annoying, but the views of queens and drones (not the electronic kind) emerging is pretty cool:

Only a few days later there were more nuptial flights. I didn't actually observe any of the ants emerging or flying, but was lucky to catch 4 queens. My wife spotted the first queen on our window sill in the living room.  Yup, the queen was nice enough to make things really easy for me and come right into my house.  Not only that, when I placed my container in front of her, she walked right in.  She looks very much like a Camponotus (carpenter ant), though I wouldn't have expected to find anymore of these girls at this time of year.  When I put her in the test tube set up, she did what all the Camponotus queens I have found did, and started diligently trying to remove the cotton:

In the past when I have found queens I have found a whole bunch of a single species.  This time I found only a few of three different species.  Finding the queen inside the house, I immediately ran outside hoping to find more.  I found a couple of more regular sized queens pretty quickly.  Working further up a lane, I spotted an almost worker sized ant that was behaving like a queen - workers tend to move in a zig-zag, random pattern, as they search for food.  Queens tend to run more in a straight line. I decided to grab her.  She went ballistic inside the container, which made me even more convinced she was probably a worker, but decided to hang onto her just in case.  When I moved all four ants into test tube setups, the little ant did the weirdest thing I have yet seen an ant do.  She hit the wet cotton and immediately died.  She completely stopped moving, and looked kind of splayed out, as if I had squashed her.  I watched her for quite awhile and was convinced that was the end of her. I took her back outside to dispose of her by tapping her out of the tube. When she fell out, she hit the ground running! With some effort I caught her again. Under the microscope her wing scars proved her to be of royal heritage.  Here is a shot of my little red queen and the other two types I found for size comparison:

If you are laughing your head off at this point about all this ant-geekiness, and thinking I am just a nut, well selling ants this past year paid for my purple car!  Granted, it's not exactly a Mercedes, but still, my ants bought me a car, how cool is that!

What's great about having insects/arachnids for pets? Well for one, no poop!

I would say having a house full of insect/arachnid pets is a lot less work than having a dog, about the same as having a cat, and probably less than having an aquarium full of fancy fish.  The big advantage of insects/arachnids, as the title says, is there is rarely a need to clean up poop.  You would have quite a challenging time even finding poop to clean up.  Because most of my critters live in containers lined with some kind of substrate, mostly coconut choir mixed with peat moss and vermiculite, the poop simply composts on site and disappears. The work is in maintaining humidity and in finding food for them all. I say finding food, rather than feeding them, because feeding them is quite entertaining, and doesn't feel like work.  But finding the food can be quite challenging.  Tiny 1/4 spiderlings require fruit flies or at most, week old crickets.  My Avicularia spiderling prefers maggots.  My larger tarantulas eat larger crickets.  The rule of thumb is the length of the cricket should not exceed the length of the spiders abdomen:

Jennifer's Abdomen

My Mantids really like moths, that I collect from around my back porch light.  I am nervous about feeding wild-caught insects because they may have been tainted with pesticides, but so far it hasn't caused a problem. Fruit flies are not always that easy to get, but once you have them it is easy and inexpensive to maintain a culture. I periodically contemplate raising my own crickets, but quickly dismiss the idea.  Crickets are smelly and once they get to sexual maturity, loud. But sometimes you go to the store to get some, and they just don't have any, or the ones they have are all too big.  Or sometimes, they are all dead. Fortunately, unlike a cat or a dog that really doesn't tolerate being without food for long, most of my critters can go several weeks without food without any harm.  The exception would be the mantids that seem to need to eat regularly, and the ant colonies which need an input of calories pretty much all the time (with the exception of queens that don't have workers yet, they can live for over a year without eating - I know this because I have queens that haven't eaten in that long). The ants can be left with supplies for quite awhile though, as long as it things like honey and seeds that won't go moldy.

My critters take up a chunk of most of my evenings, after my son has gone to bed.  Some nights I am just too tired and other than making sure the mantids have a misting of water (they don't really go in for water dishes), I don't pay any attention to any of them.  Try doing that with a dog!

And then there were three

I started out with about 30 mantids. I sold quite a number of them, lost a few to actual deaths (as opposed to a lot of just playing dead).  The number one killer of mantids seems to be molting accidents.  Molting is the process of shedding the exoskeleton so they can grow. This is a really vulnerable time for them, definitely a time when they could be eaten by predators out in the real world.  In my house I lost a few because I just wasn't paying attention when I picked up their containers to feed them, and disturbing a molting mantis will usually result in it falling. Having hit the ground, it's exoskeleton will harden into a position not conducive to continued existence.  Poor Rambo though, so named because he had already survived a number of difficult mantis-life experiences (including three days wandering my house on his own), simply chose a poor location to molt.  He was too near the ground and so as he shed his skin, hanging upside down as they do, he hit the dirt in the bottom of his container before be managed to completely shed his skin.  This mangled his poor head and body, and I put him in the freezer to end his suffering.

Rest in peace (or pieces?) poor Rambo.  Note the old exoskeleton still clinging to the bottom of his body.

The three that are left, Stripey, CrazyPants and No-Name, are living a charmed existence, and are ridiculously entertaining. These tiny cats love to groom themselves and love to sit on people.  As soon as they see me, I swear, they just want out so they can inhabit my person.  They really are keen on people. You wouldn't think an insect brain would even note the existence of people.  Certainly my tarantulas do not consider me to be of the same universe as they are.  But the mantids clearly enjoy my company - see accompanying images!

"I'm so tired from eating that yummy maggot, mind if I just use your hand as a lawn chair for awhile?  By the way, you should clean your fingernails!"

"While I am here, I may as well clean up the maggot-related toe-jam."