Ants

[_scorpio_]

an interesting week full of ants for me.
i found my first wood ant nest in the woods and did the bluebell test which was very cool.
now, i was moving some bits of cars around at work and i decided to poke around behind the "second-hand shed" and found some black ants on a cuban cigar... very odd... so after placing the item on the managers desk (ants and all ) i went back out to finish moving stuff around and on a tyre there was a black ant which was definitely not a Lasius niger. after a while a few more appeared, and were wandering around with the L. nigers (without any conflicts occurring...) and i could see they were definitely a different species, but not one i am aware of in the UK. so i smashed some flies and fed them... before long there were about 50 or so and they were moving the fly at an amazing rate. it must have moved about a meter in a minute!anyway, to give a short description to help with ID until i can catch one, they were about 1/3 larger than the L. niger and were pure black (unlike the slightly brown L. niger) and properly shiny.

anyway, thought i would say in case they are rare or shouldnt be here.
i will get a few on monday and take some photos next to some things for perspective and maybe some L. niger too.

oh, and they are not the Lasius neglectus which google will tell you about if you google UK invasive ants...

thanks.

 

[Harvestman]

I can't identify it just from a description (and probably not even from a picture - ants are difficult), but you have reminded me of when I was a student in Bangor University years ago. One of the lecturers was intertested in tropical leafcutter ants (Atta cephalotes) and had a special room in an outbuilding where a colony lived. In summer the ants used to forage out of the room through a ventilation brick, go across the car park, and strip the blackberry bushes of leaves. There was a bakery next door and their currant buns were highly suspect!

The workers for those ants were massive - about an inch long at largest, and most of that was head and jaws. if they got on your shoes they could cut a piece out of your shoe leather, and if they went up your trouser leg and got stuck, they would bite! That really hurt.

Anyway, as an experiment, I noticed that there was a colony of ordinary UK Lasius niger nearby, and there seemed to be a clearly marked 'no-ants land' between the two. I dropped a couple of the big leafcutter workers onto the wrong side of the line, and they got torn to shreds.

 

[_scorpio_]

i hope to find the nest site and poke it a bit, then if some massive headed ones come out i will know they arent native.
i have done something similar to what you did, in spain. there were 2 any nests near each other, one lot of them were about 1mm long and the guard ones of the other nest had heads about 2mm wide.
i put one guard on a rock covered in about 200 little ones from the other species, and they instantly ran away from it and kept there distance (quite an even circle actually) and maintained this as it walked around the rock... very cool.

 

[shaggystu]

....i found my first wood ant nest in the woods and did the bluebell test which was very cool.....

bluebell test?

 

[_scorpio_]

when they defend their nest from the attacking bluebell they spray it with acid and turn it purple/pink

 

[Shewie]

Not very helpful but I thought these images were pretty cool on the Beeb yesterday ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12880498

 

[_scorpio_]

those close-ups make those ants look really ugly! very interesting pictures.

 

[shaggystu]

when they defend their nest from the attacking bluebell they spray it with acid and turn it purple/pink

thanks for that scorpio, never heard of that before. i have both ants and blubells in my garden, an afternoon giving the neighbours yet more reasons to point and stare may be in order!

stuart