Termite nuptial flight

I haven't ever really thought much about termites until yesterday. I recently moved from a large city to an acreage in a different province. This place is an insect/arachnid heaven. There is so much to see and discover here. On a short hike yesterday I found an old stump that looked quite occupied. I dug around pulling out rotten wood and food a few small spiders, a harvestman and some termites, including what was obviously a termite queen-to-be (alate). I obviously disturbed her and she worked hard to get away from me and burrow down into the wood. Having seen one, and now knowing what they look like,  today I noticed a lot of them flying around and hitting the ground. I ran home and grabbed some containers and managed to find four of them before the light got too dim for me to find anymore. Below are some shots of one with her wings still, and the others with wings already taken off. These guys were super fast and really hard to take pictures of. At one point, while trying to take a picture of one on my hand, I dropped it on the floor and had a really hard time finding it. Not sure my wife would have been too impressed by my introducing a termite queen into our very old, primarily wooden house. Fortunately I managed to find it again. I kept two to try my hand at a captive (well enclosed) colony, and fed the other two to a couple of my spiders.

Little spider eating little fly. My best photograph to date

As any of you who read this blog (all three of you), I am not so talented at the photography part of this whole blogging thing.  But the other day I got a pretty decent one.  This is a little spider I found in my basement and moved temporarily into a container. I have been feeding her fruit flies and she seems pretty happy. After a few days of gorging herself in the container, I left the top open on purpose and she moved on. If she is hanging out in my room somewhere she will continue to be well fed on the fruit fly escapees.

Is that your lunch your are eating? Oh GOD NO IT'S YOUR SPOUSE!

I think the whole bit about spiders eating their mates is a little overblown in the media and in popular culture.This article:
http://www.livescience.com/7555-creepy-cannibalism-female-spiders-eat-mates.html
talks about this phenomena and how it usually comes down to size difference.  When the male is a lot smaller, the female is more likely to eat him.  Why? Well she is hungry and he is small and available.

However, my attempt to breed my two Phidippus regius (royal jumping spiders) was not a testament to this idea.  Rogelio and Xiomara (from the t.v. show Jane the Virgin) were purchased as a nearly mature couple of captive bred spiders from TarantulaCanada.com. I was advised that the may or may not molt one more time, and to place their enclosures side by side.  After their last molt, and when they start to show a lot of interest in each other, they may be ready to breed.

I watched a lot of videos of jumping spiders breeding, so I would know what to expect. I researched as much as I could about how to do this.  I thought I was ready, and I cautiously put them together, having just fed them both a mealworm, and closely monitored them. They seemed to mostly be ignoring each other. Then my four year old son needed a drink, or a sandwich or something: my attention was lost for just a moment and . . .

If it seems like there are too many legs in this picture it's because there are.

I don't know if Rogelio saw it coming, I sure didn't.  The astonishing thing was, they were nearly the same size. And she ate every bit of him. There wasn't so much of a scrap of exoskeleton left. It took her a very long time and afterwards she was very sluggish and her abdomen was ridiculously large for about a week. And then she molted.  Boy did I get that all very very wrong.

And poor Xiomara, she missed what was very likely her only chance to produce offspring. She did however get the biggest meal of her life. Hope he was tasty.

More on Tapinoma sessile - combining colonies

Having learned a bit more about Tapinoma sessile, I decided I would try and combine together my two small colonies.  Apparently colonies with multiple queens are quite common, and colonies do not show animosity to each other when they meet.  I thought it was worth a try and the combined colony might be a lot more vigorous. I joined the two test tubes to a common outworld and waited, hoping they wouldn't murder each other. It took about 18 hours for them to interact.  Unfortunately I missed seeing the first contact, which occurred sometime in the middle of the night.  This morning though, there is brood moving.  I no longer have any idea which ants are from which colony, but there doesn't seem to be any animosity at all.  The brood is being moved out of the smaller colony's tube and into the larger colony's tube.  There is a bit of squabbling going on, I watched some workers trying to move a larvae and other workers trying to put her back. But no actual fighting to the point of injury.  The queen of the smaller colony seems calm, though there is no sign of her going anywhere.  If this is successful I am going to try to add a queen with no workers and only brood, who is a year younger.  Hopefully that will increase the longevity of the colony, soon to be super-colony!

A few hours later . . . all the brood has been moved into the larger colonies territory.  Everything is peaceful in that tube.  In the smaller colonies tube, things are a little rougher.  There are a few workers clearly harassing others, I assume ones from the smaller colony are the harassed, maybe the ones that are reluctant to move.  It's starting to look a little violent.  The queen seems to exempt from this so far, and is just chilling at the far end cuddled up to the cotton.

Connecting the two colonies to a single outworld (a small deli container)

The next day. . . the tube from the smaller colony still has the original queen in it, and she is constantly surrounded by 5 or 6 workers that seem to be endlessly harassing her, I assume trying to get her to move out, which she seems very uninterested in doing.  I might have to help this process along, because now she has no brood and the workers aren't particularly caring for her.  I hope this ends well, so far no bloodshed, but I am not sure it will stay that way!

The next next day. . . it all ended badly I am sorry to say.  I joined the two tubes directly together, because the queen from the smaller colony really was in a bad spot either way, all her brood gone, and her workers fled, and the new workers apparently just harassing her to move. But when she did move, and found herself in the tube of the larger colony, the other queen started fighting with her, and then the workers followed suit.  She tried to retreat back to her own tube, and I tried to intervene, but it was two late.  The workers that followed her essentially started ripping her limb from limb, and I rescued her to euthanize her in the freezer, and a few workers with her that I couldn't get out of the tube. A sad day, I feel quite responsible for this disaster. Perhaps they can combine colonies in the great outdoors, but maybe not in the confines of a test tube, or perhaps the circumstances need to be very specific and only queens that are originally nest mates can combine. Who knows, but I won't repeat this experiment!

Tapinoma sessile ant keeping

Tapinoma sessile ants are very common throughout North America, and from the bits of information I have discovered about them, which isn't very much, they often have multiple queens. I have two small colonies of these guys from two summers ago, plus a lot of queens with brood from this last summer, yet to hatch. The queens are about the same size as the Formica limata queens I have previously found, but the workers are tiny, and all the same size. They are actually super cute, but I need a magnifier to see pretty much anything they are doing.  The queen is so much bigger than the workers, they really don't look like they could possibly be related.

Tapinoma sessile queen, workers and brood

One of the issues I have gathered from little bits of info on the ant keeper's forums is that of feeding them protein. While they seem to take liquids, especially sugary liquids quite readily, they apparently aren't keen on much else.  I have had success with with freezing mealworms and then cutting off their heads and dropping them in. They seem to enjoy the fatty material oozing out of the mealworm. So far these guys have been easy to keep. Both of my two year old colonies are still in test tube setups, the larger one has about 20 workers and 30 brood, and the other is much smaller with only 4 worker, and maybe 10 brood. Most of these queens seem to lay a lot of eggs in their first batch.

Two tiny workers and a mealworm lunch

It is my understanding that the queens don't live that long, but queens going off on a nuptial flight may return to their home colony after mating, and so the colony can continue on in this fashion endlessly, though that doesn't work quite so well for keeping these guys in captivity. I may try to join up some of last summers queens and brood with my two colonies, in the hopes of keeping them going longer. These guys are really active, especially later in the day and into the evening, but often during the day all the workers stand very still, almost in a formation, for hours on end, seemingly in a trance.

These colonies are also said to move easily to new nests, and I have found it is easier to move these guys out of a dry or moldy test tube than most of the other colonies I have had.

All in all I find these guys a pleasure to keep and observe.

Avicularia purpurea molt - iridescence on the exoskeleton

I had to look up iridescence, to figure out how to spell it, and I hadn't really thought about the definition, but here it is, via wikipedia:

Iridescence (also known as goniochromism) is the phenomenon of certain surfaces that appear to gradually change colour as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes. Examples of iridescence include soap bubbles, butterfly wings and sea shells, as well as certain minerals.

Apparently another example is the footpads of Avicularia species tarantulas.

I am really grooving on taking shots of post-molt exoskeletons. After all, you have all the time in the world to set up the shot. And I got some nice shots of the iridescence that I have been noticing in certain lights on their foot pads. And I also got a nice shot of those needle-sharp fangs. This molt had being hanging around for quite awhile at the bottom of Arabella's silk home. She seemed to be increasingly bothered by it, avoiding that end of the home, occasionally going down and pushing on it a bit. So today I decided that perhaps she would prefer it gone. Usually tarantulas decide themselves when to kick the molt out.  Most of them seem to keep them for at least a few days, not sure why. Maybe just recovering enough to have the energy to do the job.

How to know when a spider wants supper

Avicularia tarantulas are some of the most beautiful tarantulas, in my opinion. They are also notoriously hard to keep as spiderlings, requiring a delicate balance of high humidity and good cross ventilation lest they succumb to mold or molting related problems. I have two that seem to be thriving. Arabella, my Avicularia cf. purpurea, is about a year old now, and the other, Tchaiovsky, Avicularia diversipes, is about 5 months. I keep them in food containers with an opening on the top and the bottom, a crapload of ventilation holes drilled in the sides and moist cotton balls instead of substrate (for now anyway). Every time I feed them I throw out the old cotton balls and put new ones in. I figure this will really decrease the opportunity for mold to develop, and it seems to work really well for these two anyway. I keep them on my desk, not on a shelf, because there is more airflow on my desk than anywhere else in the room. Plus I like watching them while I work.

 One of the things I quite like about these guys, besides their beautiful coloration and calm temperament, as well as the way the walk around lifting their limbs incredibly high in the air, is the way the let me know when they are ready for a meal. They both have a spot that they sit every time they are ready to eat. There really isn't any guess work involved, they basically look like dogs begging for a biscuit. Unfortunately these photos don't do them justice, they both are shimmery and metallic looking in just the right light, but I never seem to be able to capture that light with my camera.

Tchaikovsky

Arabella