Myrmecological Musings

I had an E.O. Wilson moment yesterday. In case the name isn't familiar, Edward O. Wilson is famous for his studies of ants and their behavior, and is considered one of the founders of the concept of sociobiology. And, being an insect geek and a behavioral studies geek, he's one of my heroes.  Anyway, I was moving things around in my shed and when I shifted a stack of disassembled and nested pet carriers, I dislodged a small colony of Florida carpenter ants. My initial reaction was along the lines of “Holy crap!” and quickly progressed to “I don’t wanna get bitten by those!” Not that I’d never seen carpenter ants before, I just had never seen them my shed. Carpenter ants are big, like half an inch long for the major workers (slightly smaller for the minor workers), so they make an impression when you send a bunch of them scrambling. I quickly took the stack of carriers outside and looked it over in a fruitless search for what I assumed was some massive glob of big, angry ants.

Smile! I have big mandibles and can bite real hard.

By the time I went back into the shed, probably less than a minute later, the survivors were well into damage control. The colony had been built on the shelf that housed the pet carriers, with the underside of the bottom carrier serving as a roof, so moving the carriers had been like ripping the roof of a house, leaving everything exposed where once it had been safely protected. There wasn’t that much to it. Larvae were scattered all over, and that was about it. It had been a very small colony, only 3 or 4 dozen adults (including casualties). It was probably a very new satellite colony recently branched from a larger colony nearby. Adult ants were running around gathering up the larvae and…here’s where I got sucked in, and where E.O. would be proud.

Save the larvae!

Their home was gone, what would they do? At first they just milled around with the larvae in their mandibles. Some ants carried one larvae at a time, but many were gathering several at a time. There were a few individuals roaming around the periphery of their former home, and they soon spread out beyond the old boundaries. On the same shelf, but to the left are a couple of 3 gallon pots stacked together. To the right is a clear plastic storage bin. Within moments, some of the adults were transporting larvae to the little hollow formed where the curved side of the storage container meets the shelf, while others carried larvae to the pots. The “shelter” at the storage container was minimal, kind of like standing under the roof overhang of a house in a driving rain storm: better than being out in the middle of an open field, but not exactly protection either.

Minor worker carrying at least 3 larvae.

The larva rescuers were running to their respective destinations along similar paths, no matter where their starting point was at “the scene.” Probably following pheromone trails set up by the scouts whose job it was to find a new safe place—maybe those individuals I’d noticed wandering around earlier. At first, about half of the rescuers stashed the young at each of the two possible destinations, but before long, most were carrying them to the pots, apparently depositing them, and then coming back to ground zero to gather more larvae. Within a few minutes they had gathered all the scattered larvae. Then they went to the storage container and took the larvae that had been stashed there and moved them over to the pots!

So now I apparently have a small colony of carpenter ants living in a stack of pots in my shed. It probably won’t take it long to become a large colony of carpenter ants and even though they don’t really do any harm (these ants eat rotting wood and fruit, but don’t damage sound wood), I will probably have to relocate them. Otherwise I’ll probably forget they’re there, take the pots off the shelf to use and discover them all over again, quite possibly as a couple dozen of them race up my hands and attack. I’ll put them near my compost pile, which is probably their main food source anyway.