Post by Deleted on Feb 2, 2011 0:23:28 GMT 1
Well I say 'disaster' as that's what it seemed to be at first.
Where to begin with this very strange story?
This afternoon, I checked up on my colony where I noticed a lot more activity. For the past two or so days, they've been super quiet. I had to expose them a couple of times to check they were okay, to find them all huddled together with the queen, right by the cotton wool dam. All alive though.
Today however, I saw a few walking around in the further up part of the test tube, which I have exposed. On looking closer, it seemed I had a dead ant. Then I looked again and there appeared to be two. I've had this colony for three weeks or so now, with not one fatality. It seemed strange to me that two would suddenly go at once. A while later, I saw two more by the cotton wool bung and they were upright but still. I moved the bung and they seemed to not move and were apparantly dead too.
A gut feeling of disaster ran through me and, expecting the worst, I exposed the whole test tube. What I found was other seemingly dead ants, near the queen and others alive but seeming lathargic and possibly just in earlier stages of illness. The queen, however, seemed to be totally unaffected. Suspecting disease or poison, my main priority at this point was to get the queen out. She wasn't that willing but eventually I got her out and stuck her in an empty hamster feeder. She ran around for a bit, proving she was fit, until deciding to then sit and wash herself.
Back to my workers; I got out the seemingly dead ants with my cotton wool bud and put them on this peice of paper. It looked like a battle field. The alive ones (none looked totally healthy like the queen at this point) I deposited into the bottom of an empty pint glass. After a few minutes of this (particularly as some of the 'okayish' workers were reluctant to being arrested from the tube) I noticed that one of the workers in the pint glass seemed to become a lot brighter and it was starting to walk up the side of the glass. I had to contain it somehow, so, with the queen quaranteened, I decided to put it in the gel farm, where I could safely contain them whilst still being able to see how they are.
That wasn't the last of it though. Slowly but surely, the others in the glass started to properly wake up and try and run out of the glass, so these too had to go in the gel farm. Not only that though, but as I was set about to dispose of the dead ants, I notices when I touched them, they moved a little bit. A few didn't move at all and I was totally sure were dead but a good few did. As the minutes passed by, some were even trying to walk, in a very stop/start stuttery way. Still assuming disease, I thought that the only slim hope of survival would be to bathe them and then leave them to see if they recovered. I did this with all the ones that were definately still alive.
Although I had only put them in the water a second or two at a time before taking them out (so not to drown them) the water seemed to knock them out and they would appear lifeless again for a minute or two. However, within half an hour, all were showing signs of recovery. I still had two or three that seemed already gone, but considering I thought I'd lost them all at one point, I could live with that. However, even these started recovering, so I bathed them and left them to dry out too. Eventually, all the workers were in the farm, some now running around, others still looking a bit groggy. Although I had thought of disposing of all the workers and leaving the queen to start all over, I decided they'd shown too much recovery to just be killed or thrown out into the wild queenless (having spent all their lives in captivity). However, I was worried that keeping them separate from the queen too long could mean the queen and the workers might reject each other, so I put the queen in the farm too (this is not a permanent situation).
After being out for a few hours, I can see all of them alive, sitting on the surface of the gel, most of them fussing over the queen in one of the corners. The only casualtites have been the eggs (and possibly some first state larvae), as I washed the tube out, convinced of disease. Tomorrow, I want to return them back to the test tube, but I still don't know what happened. The only two things that make a pattern are that they were being really timid for the two days previous and last night, I put a bit of fish bait in for them. I did suspect that the fish bait may have poisened them, but then their weird behaviour 48 hours previous cannot have been related to that then. But it seems that every last ant is going to live. One thing people here might think was that the room temperature dropped so much that they went into hybernation, but the room is always warm, way too warm for hybernation and the queen appeared unaffected.
In all the years, this is by far the weirdest thing I have observed in ants. Does anyone out there have any ideas on what on earth happened today?
Where to begin with this very strange story?
This afternoon, I checked up on my colony where I noticed a lot more activity. For the past two or so days, they've been super quiet. I had to expose them a couple of times to check they were okay, to find them all huddled together with the queen, right by the cotton wool dam. All alive though.
Today however, I saw a few walking around in the further up part of the test tube, which I have exposed. On looking closer, it seemed I had a dead ant. Then I looked again and there appeared to be two. I've had this colony for three weeks or so now, with not one fatality. It seemed strange to me that two would suddenly go at once. A while later, I saw two more by the cotton wool bung and they were upright but still. I moved the bung and they seemed to not move and were apparantly dead too.
A gut feeling of disaster ran through me and, expecting the worst, I exposed the whole test tube. What I found was other seemingly dead ants, near the queen and others alive but seeming lathargic and possibly just in earlier stages of illness. The queen, however, seemed to be totally unaffected. Suspecting disease or poison, my main priority at this point was to get the queen out. She wasn't that willing but eventually I got her out and stuck her in an empty hamster feeder. She ran around for a bit, proving she was fit, until deciding to then sit and wash herself.
Back to my workers; I got out the seemingly dead ants with my cotton wool bud and put them on this peice of paper. It looked like a battle field. The alive ones (none looked totally healthy like the queen at this point) I deposited into the bottom of an empty pint glass. After a few minutes of this (particularly as some of the 'okayish' workers were reluctant to being arrested from the tube) I noticed that one of the workers in the pint glass seemed to become a lot brighter and it was starting to walk up the side of the glass. I had to contain it somehow, so, with the queen quaranteened, I decided to put it in the gel farm, where I could safely contain them whilst still being able to see how they are.
That wasn't the last of it though. Slowly but surely, the others in the glass started to properly wake up and try and run out of the glass, so these too had to go in the gel farm. Not only that though, but as I was set about to dispose of the dead ants, I notices when I touched them, they moved a little bit. A few didn't move at all and I was totally sure were dead but a good few did. As the minutes passed by, some were even trying to walk, in a very stop/start stuttery way. Still assuming disease, I thought that the only slim hope of survival would be to bathe them and then leave them to see if they recovered. I did this with all the ones that were definately still alive.
Although I had only put them in the water a second or two at a time before taking them out (so not to drown them) the water seemed to knock them out and they would appear lifeless again for a minute or two. However, within half an hour, all were showing signs of recovery. I still had two or three that seemed already gone, but considering I thought I'd lost them all at one point, I could live with that. However, even these started recovering, so I bathed them and left them to dry out too. Eventually, all the workers were in the farm, some now running around, others still looking a bit groggy. Although I had thought of disposing of all the workers and leaving the queen to start all over, I decided they'd shown too much recovery to just be killed or thrown out into the wild queenless (having spent all their lives in captivity). However, I was worried that keeping them separate from the queen too long could mean the queen and the workers might reject each other, so I put the queen in the farm too (this is not a permanent situation).
After being out for a few hours, I can see all of them alive, sitting on the surface of the gel, most of them fussing over the queen in one of the corners. The only casualtites have been the eggs (and possibly some first state larvae), as I washed the tube out, convinced of disease. Tomorrow, I want to return them back to the test tube, but I still don't know what happened. The only two things that make a pattern are that they were being really timid for the two days previous and last night, I put a bit of fish bait in for them. I did suspect that the fish bait may have poisened them, but then their weird behaviour 48 hours previous cannot have been related to that then. But it seems that every last ant is going to live. One thing people here might think was that the room temperature dropped so much that they went into hybernation, but the room is always warm, way too warm for hybernation and the queen appeared unaffected.
In all the years, this is by far the weirdest thing I have observed in ants. Does anyone out there have any ideas on what on earth happened today?