Visitors 63
Modified 21-Dec-23
Created 21-Sep-21
29 photos
Finished with our part in the ant survey, happily tired, we walk back to the Sun Research Center along the ridge, making it a nice loop for the day. As we take a small detour along Trail 4, along the Blue Oak forest, my survey partner John calls me back. Ants! Not just a few -- a whole colony. Moving their nest: carrying eggs, larvae, and what seems to be dead ants. (Do you want to bury your dead comrades near your new nest? Or... could these be queens??) I take some quick photos, not able to really focus on the scurrying ants. Here are a dozen photos taken over the space of one minute, with my apologies for the focus and image quality.
Later, I point out the ant hotspot near the Shack Riders' shack (AKA the Hillside Lab, its later incarnation). John exclaims again: Ants! This time, winged Carpenter Ants emerge from several nest openings, driven, eager to fly. But then they seem to lose motivation. Gradually, they retreat back into the nests. We notice a few un-winged workers, majors, active in the forefront of the mob. They seem to be herding the eager winged males back into the nest. We watch for three minutes, at two or three nests. As we leave, all the ants seem to be retreating; we never see any ant fully leave the nest or fly away.
Questions:
1. How do all the local ants of one species know which day to fly? Which hour?? For their incipient queens to mate with males from another colony, they have to coordinate their pickup flights. (Rain was possible. That night, it rained at my house a few miles away, enough to leave wet streets in any case. And the moon was almost full.)
2. How long is the time window for them to leave? Once they put on their wings, how soon must they fly, before they turn into pumpkins? (These ants might well have successfully flown later in the day.)
Please leave a comment on a photo if you have any information or ideas!
The first photos here are of the second adventure, winged ants: they are more compelling. The times are in the captions.
