Division in the Ranks

If you think getting a all-night-music playing, defaulted on the rent, garbage hoarding tenant to move out of your house is hard, try getting an ant colony to move out of a filthy, fungus encrusted, dried up old test tube! I have tried applying heat (usually with catastrophic results due to condensation), applying light, and bashing the tube with something metal to make a horrible noise and vibration.  I have also tried the old be really patient and just wait tactic.  That one seems to take months.  What is it about the moldy old test tube that they cling to so vehemently? I guess us humans do that to, always a bit afraid of change, aren't we?

I find the queen can be much more stubborn than her workers when it comes to moving on. This is where the real hierarchy in ant colonies becomes clear. Queens don't actually rule the kingdom, telling their workers what to do.  Instead the whole colony acts as a super-organism. Or does it?

I have been trying to get a colony of Lasius ants to move out of a really disgusting tube that is dangerously contaminated with mold (that I think came from a maggot that they insisted on carrying into the tube). Well, as you will see in the picture below, the three workers have all moved into the new tube, two days ago! The queen is still hanging out in the old tube, snorting up fungal spores. The workers, to anthropomorphize, seem to be staring longingly in the direction of the wayward mother, as if she is just not functional enough to make an intelligent decision about where she should be.

Those Hairy, Scary Tarantulas

When I got started with arachnid and insect pets, I had no intentions of getting any tarantulas.  After a few orders from tarantulacanada.com, my all time favorite source of critters, they sent me a free tarantula.  The non-intimidating kind, just a quarter of an inch big.  Tiny, pink, and positively not scary.  Easing me in, they were, like the drug dealer giving away dime bags of coke to unsuspecting children. I was however, quite horrified at getting that first tarantula, especially since I wasn't expecting it.  But it was quite cute, in a weird sort of way, so I kept it, as well as the 3 other freebie tarantulas they sent me over the next several months. I began to really look forward to the surprises they sent me. Well I have seven tarantulas now, my four freebies and three dwarfs ordered on purpose.  While most of them are still acceptably small, the first two freebies are now large.  Large for me anyway, 2.5 inches from tip of toe to tip of toe. I am a little freaked out by these not so small tarantulas,  In fact, I have one of them on kijiji even as we speak.  A girl contacted me the other day expressing interest in buying one of them.  She asked me if I handled them, and I said "No, I think they could be handled, they are quite mellow, but it just isn't my thing."  This was putting it mildly.  She sent me back a picture of herself, holding a much larger tarantula in her hand.  This prompted my response, "That would make me scream like a small child." She asked how old I was. She was probably shock to discover that I am probably 2X her age.

Today I tried to move one of these suckers out of her old enclosure into a new, bigger, better one, in preparation for sale.  Well the darn thing ended up skittering around my desk, much faster than I would have believed possible for a critter that normally lumbers like a cow in labor.  Fortunately I caught it, after squealing like a 5 year old for awhile.  Nope, truth is I am not that keen on the big tarantulas, call me a wimp if you wish, I don't mind.  I will stick with my mantids, whip-spiders, jumping spiders, etc.  And the dwarf tarantulas, there are some really beautiful, colorful dwarfs.  Oh, and Avicularia tarantulas (they are more like little ballerinas than spiders).  I still look forward to my surprises from Tarantula Canada, and I really like watching the tiny little spiderlings grow into recognizable tarantulas, but once they get a certain size, well, pet spider anyone?

Jennifer, Hairy and Scary

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."

Keeping Carnivorous Pets

I am that kind of person, the kind that will collect a house fly, spider, wasp, bee, basically anything that finds it's way into the house, in a cup and take it outside rather than killing it.  Well mostly the spiders I just leave inside, or if it is particularly interesting, I will capture it to keep inside and observe for awhile before releasing.  I really have no interest in killing anything, with the notable exception of ticks.  Ticks I hate, and will happily not only kill, but perhaps torture, just a little, along the way.  Getting a pet that needed to be fed something alive was something I really didn't think I could ever do.  Now I have a house full of them. It was a weird transition, the first arachnid I got, I would go to the pet store and buy a single cricket to bring home and feed.  I didn't want anymore in the house than that, and I struggled with throwing that cricket in, and did not enjoy seeing it consumed. Now I have to remind myself to give the crickets basic care, remind myself that they are in fact living creatures, not just food. I have become so desensitized to their plight, that I often go to get some from their container and realize they have no source of water.  Then I get angry with myself for treating them so badly. At the same time, I cannot bring myself to crush their heads, as is sometimes recommend for feeding spiderlings to prevent the cricket from harming very small and fragile spiders.  Instead the spiderlings get fruit flies.  I myself eat meat, so I recognize the hypocrisy, but I still cannot do it.

A year after I acquired my first arachnid, I have come to quite enjoy watching my spiders catch their prey, the excitement of watching their incredible hunting skills. They are generally really quick though, they inject venom that I like to imagine knocks the prey out and that's the end of it (I have no basis in fact for this assumption).  The mantids are a whole different story.  The 6 mantids I have left (the rest have been sold or given away) have gotten big enough to switch from fruit flies to maggots.  Tonight I really couldn't watch them eat their first maggots.  Mantids definitely do not kill their prey swiftly.  They eat pretty much everything they catch like a cob of corn, from the middle.  So those poor maggots suffer and struggle while the mantis starts at their mid section. I am very glad that I am far to big to die and the hands of a mantis.

I still take flies, spiders, wasps and bees out of the house and release them.

Praying Mantis Playing Dead

One of my mantids suddenly died.  It was a shocking situation, I barely touched the poor dude, and he just keeled over and was no more.  I couldn't figure out how this possibly could have killed him, but after poking at him a bit to confirm he really was gone, I put him aside to deal with later (does this remind of you of the drowned ant story?).  About 15 minutes later, he was not so dead.  So I looked up praying mantis playing dead on google.  I found one site with photos of a much large mantis playing dead and then looking quite alive, here:
http://www.drybrushwet.com/nature/praying-mantis-playing-dead/

and a very obscure reference, reference to a reference really, in the book

The Optical Unconscious

By Rosalind E. Krauss,

Krauss refers to writing by Roger Calloisa, French intellectual writer, who remarked that the mantis was capable of feigning death even when decapitated, and therefore, essentially dead.  Being able to pretend to be dead when you are, kind of already dead, is quite a feat indeed.  

I didn't try decapitating any of my mantids to test this out, but I did manage to get a very obvious playing dead and reawakening video, which is above, I apologize for the quality of the video, I will try to improve on it later.  I am really falling for these insects that are such incredible characters.  More to follow on the wonders of the praying mantis.