What do I do if I've found a new species?
Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2017 5:40 am
Okay, so first off I live in the Yukon Territory of Canada.
I was taking a walk with my girlfriend trying to find a queen ant, and we found a log with a few holes in it and we thought it might be a queen chamber .... we were kind of right.
the thing is we found two species of ants living together, in the same chamber. There is a large major species with many queens and a smaller species with it's own queen ant.
At first we thought they were just itty bitty tiny hatch-lings until we made a really cool discovery, the smaller ants had their own queen!!! with her own smaller brood.
so long story short.... we kinda sorta stole the ant colonies from their log in the name of science and antlove.
The larger queens (all bloody 4 of them!) are supporting a small amount of brood of the larger species and there is one smaller queen.
I've been feeding them honey and bacon. Our initial observations showed that the larger species eat the food and then feed the smaller ones.
I still don't fully understand what the larger ants are gaining from the smaller ones but these ants are TINY, like smaller than thief ants and I thought that was the smallest ant on earth, the only one I could measure was just over 1 mm. My suspicions are that this kind of behavior is like when ants farm aphids for honeydew, but is there any other record other than ants farming another species of ant?
The larger ant species is much larger, probably about 10 to 15 times larger than the sub species and they seem to be doing well in captivity.
So aside from you guys, who do I tell to find out what kind of ant species these are and why are they in the yukon where we get -50C weather.
These are NOT normal in the yukon, we barely have ants at all, when I got my friend at Yukon College to check the biological index it only shows 3 ant species living here and that cannot be right. i know most ants here die quickly when winter comes but i KNOW there are more than 3 species here.
I was taking a walk with my girlfriend trying to find a queen ant, and we found a log with a few holes in it and we thought it might be a queen chamber .... we were kind of right.
the thing is we found two species of ants living together, in the same chamber. There is a large major species with many queens and a smaller species with it's own queen ant.
At first we thought they were just itty bitty tiny hatch-lings until we made a really cool discovery, the smaller ants had their own queen!!! with her own smaller brood.
so long story short.... we kinda sorta stole the ant colonies from their log in the name of science and antlove.
The larger queens (all bloody 4 of them!) are supporting a small amount of brood of the larger species and there is one smaller queen.
I've been feeding them honey and bacon. Our initial observations showed that the larger species eat the food and then feed the smaller ones.
I still don't fully understand what the larger ants are gaining from the smaller ones but these ants are TINY, like smaller than thief ants and I thought that was the smallest ant on earth, the only one I could measure was just over 1 mm. My suspicions are that this kind of behavior is like when ants farm aphids for honeydew, but is there any other record other than ants farming another species of ant?
The larger ant species is much larger, probably about 10 to 15 times larger than the sub species and they seem to be doing well in captivity.
So aside from you guys, who do I tell to find out what kind of ant species these are and why are they in the yukon where we get -50C weather.
These are NOT normal in the yukon, we barely have ants at all, when I got my friend at Yukon College to check the biological index it only shows 3 ant species living here and that cannot be right. i know most ants here die quickly when winter comes but i KNOW there are more than 3 species here.