Live Protein

[LightWrath]

Hi,
I have a medium sized colony of camponotus (About a year old now) and currently they have multiple out worlds. For protein they are normally fed crickets, meal worms and sometimes natural meat, which I breed in large jars. I used to kill them myself before placing them in but as they now have plenty of workers it seems to have a more natural feel if they capture it themselves.

Anyway I was wondering if it's suitable to setup an extra out world that is not connected directly to a nest entrance. Going from the nest entrance, through one out world then through another to get this section. Within this more distant out world have live food that would reproduce? Then the ants could come along and take what food they wanted and as it's alive it wouldn't go bad.

Or would the ants just get aggressive and try and kill everything even if they wasn't going to eat it?
My reason for thinking of this is to allow them a constant availability of food and it means less room taken up of me having large jars for their food.
Thanks for any feedback

[Camponotus]

Remember that in the wild, ants have a "search radius" of getting food, the larger the colony, the larger the search radius. If you want live food to reproduce in the outworld, the crickets would have to be out of and in the border of the search radius. you could try feeding them closer so they won't go as far, and having a special place for the crickets to encourage breeding and not entering the ant's territory. i think if you had multiple outworlds connected to each other and not the nest entrance, you could have crickets outside the ant's radius. it might be difficult though, depending mostly on whether the crickets would breed. either way, it would be a nice experiment and i'd be glad if you keep us updated!

[WillWithAnts]

Sounds like a very interesting experiment! As Camponotus said, please keep us posted! If you don't mind, Id like to see your nest set-up! I'm trying to determine if mine is adequate, so I'd like to compare to someone successful at raising a mature Camponotus colony. No biggie if you can't, but I'd really appreciate it!

[LightWrath]

Here's some limited feedback on this little experiment so far.
I set-up a 3rd out world connecting to the second. Which once added it was populated. After a few days of it being established I added around 15 crickets.
At first the ants seems to be very aggressive. By the first day they'd killed 2 and taken one back to the nest and the other had a leg taken back to the nest but left.
After this activity reduced by quiet a bit. The crickets had been forced into a fake plant, where there they didn't seem to get bothered by the ants but there always seems to be a few ants around the base of the plant. When the crickets came down or attempted to lay eggs in a wet bit of cotton or get some food the ants would get quite aggressive and populated the area more in this instance.

When the crickets did come down, there seemed to be showing signs of an alert. They started to vibrate, along with others in the area.

However the crickets are still laying eggs in the cotton, but I get the feeling the consumption is too fast for the rate of breeding.

[Carl75]

You may just need a higher number of crickets. This way more eggs will be laid, hatch and grow. Once you have enough they will have a constant supply. It may take time before the cricket colony is self sustaining.

As the colony of ants grows the cricket colony would need to grow too.

[GriffinAnt]

very intresting idea , please show more and keep us all updated. My queens are curruntly in status (hybernation Till March) but i like to think they are in status on a spacecraft on a jorney to mars heheheh

[larynx]

try using pin heads first. they will be small at first, then grow. this way you will have crickets of different ages. eventually you have small ones to be eaten, and large ones to breed.