Welcome, AC Family! In this episode, we uncover a potential threat in our giant rainforest vivarium, as scientists help us determine if this mysterious species could end our ecosystem project for good.
I spotted a species in my giant rainforest vivarium, that could end my whole ecosystem project for good, but the true mystery of its identity required the help of scientists to classify the animal appropriately and determine whether or not the creature was truly a threat to the vivarium and all its creatures within, or if it simply was a false alarm. Hope you enjoy this episode on ant taxonomy and the dangers of invasive species on ecosystems. Special thanks to Dr. Davide General and Perry Buenavente from UPLB National Museum of Natural History Ant love forever!
An Invasive Species Could Be THE END to My Giant Rainforest Vivarium
This is Orchadia, my 1,300-gallon rainforest canopy vivarium, a replica of the upper tree layer of a rainforest, and it’s actually connected to another giant vivarium on the lower floor below called Pandora, the rainforest floor. Together, the tanks house a tropical community of plants, fungi, and a team of creatures who all call this rainforest home, a massive and beautifully balanced ecosystem within glass. What’s cool is, even after almost nine months since its construction, I still discover new and surprising species living in our slice of jungle that I hadn’t noticed before, that snuck in with the plants and decor. But last week, I discovered a species in one of the tanks that was not a happy surprise!
Oh no! Fire ants?! Nooo! I knew I needed some help. Now, I was certain that seeing this creature meant it was the start of the end of our rainforest world, but after further inspection by scientists, it turned out there was a whole lot more to this supposed apocalyptic beast than I ever imagined. Wait until you guys hear about it here on the AntsCanada Ant Channel. Please SUBSCRIBE to the channel, and hit the BELL ICON. Welcome to the AC Family! Enjoy!
On a nearby ant volcanic island called Volcania, the Crimson Knights, my ravenous one-and-a-half-year-old colony of fire ants, were busy dissecting flesh from their raw chicken foot. The fire ants came pouring in from their mountain home, prepared to rip mandible-sized chunks from the chicken to take home for further consumption.
Now, as much as I love keeping fire ants, they are not a species I would recommend to keep as a pet, as they can be a nightmare to care for, mostly because they eat a lot, the colonies grow so big so quickly, they’re aggressive, and their stings really hurt. They are always looking for ways to escape their setup. They chew through most adhesives, rubber, and some plastics, and can escape your average ant farm, so I find the best way to keep the species is in open setups like this, surrounded by water, with a slippery barrier along the edges, which must be replaced every few months.
In light of all this, it’s truly no surprise to me that fire ants have become one of the world’s most formidable invasive species, having disrupted ecosystems worldwide, where they kill and displace native ant species, disrupt ecological relationships, and kill off a ton of creatures sharing their space. I know it sounds like I hate them, but they do have a special place in my heart when contained and controlled. But a few months ago, these fire ants launched a surprise operation to push back against my control over them when this happened.
The Crimson Knights launched a nuptial flight, a swarm of virgin queens and males, flying all over my ant room, hoping to mate and start a new generation of fire ants. I never thought they would ever have a mating flight indoors because I was controlling the colony’s protein intake, and these larger reproductive ants are very protein-expensive for the colony to produce. But I guess they still had enough to manufacture these queens and males. I was able to control the mating swarm by shutting off all lights in the Ant Room, adding a spotlight over Volcania so they could fly to it and fall back into the setup, and vacuuming the rest. But Orchadia had just been built, and my foolish self left the doors wide open that night, not thinking it would be a problem seeing as I plugged up the glass bridge so nothing could come up from Pandora. But fast forward three months later, and here we are—my worst nightmare, spotted in our rainforest.
However, there was just one thing. This fire ant looked somewhat off. What I mean is, at first glance, even to someone like myself who’s owned pet fire ants for over a decade, it looked like a fire ant from afar, but up close, it also kinda didn’t. I watched the mystery fire ant-like ant pick up a piece of cricket poop and leave to bring it back to its nest somewhere. I meant to follow it to try to locate where in Orchadia it was nesting, but I couldn’t find it after this random spotting. But I just had to get down to the truth about this ant. The idea of our rainforest being destroyed at the hands of a fire ant colony worried me to no end, so I took some screenshots of the ant and sent them to my myrmecologist friend Dr. Dave General, who works for the Museum of Natural History where I live. For sure, he would know if this ant was a fire ant, a close relative, or, if it wasn’t, what species it was.
“Good morning, Dr. General! I spotted some small red ants (approx. 4 mm in body length) in my ficus. Any idea what species it is?”
I sent the message and couldn’t wait to hear back from him, but little did I know, the answer to my query was not at all what I expected.
Meanwhile, looking down to the rainforest floor in Pandora, I noticed Snip, our resident baby sun skink, basking on the Hallelujah tree stump. Snip had grown almost twice the size since I first spotted him, and it looks like his tail has grown back. Suddenly, a movement of orange caught his attention. “Woah! What was that?” The weaver ant came along, but a giant cricket snuck up from behind. “Ouch!” A little nibble from the cricket. These crickets will try to eat anything! The cricket returned to try again with a bite, and another, but Snip was not going to give in and give up his precious basking spot to a cricket. One day, Snip would be big enough to eat this cricket’s descendants! But Snip’s main concern right now were these new giant weaver ants that had moved in. He knew not to mess with them. Even Godzilla, our resident baby caiman, knew to stay clear, as he basked on his mossy hill, keeping a close eye on the new neighbors frequenting the foliage above. They were not so much a physical threat to our croc, but they were competition. The weaver ants were doing a great job at catching prey insects in the forest; such skilled hunters they were. And for good reason! They needed the food! This new weaver ant colony, a species of arboreal ant that creates basket nests made of leaves from trees and shrubs, had constructed several leaf nests in Pandora’s vines, and have since created another nest to accommodate their growing numbers. I was happy to see these ants doing so well because these weaver ants were my only hope for a line of defense against any fire ants appearing in the tank. They’re actually ferocious enough to eat them in the wild. They totally dominated the Pandoran vines now.
The vines were a valuable resource to ants, and there were several species competing for its life-giving offerings. A pair of carpenter ants proceeded cautiously up the vine roots. “Stay close. We must move together.” It seems the resident golden carpenter ants had become aware of the weavers who were now also visiting the vines and were after the same stuff the vines provided. I previously discovered that the vine roots were releasing a tasty fluid for the ants, which I suspect are extra-floral nectaries, designed to lure ants to their roots to protect the vines from herbivores. It was a favorite food for the carpenters and was also attracting the weavers. But that wasn’t all the ants were interested in at these vines.
A weaver ant stood over its pet mealybug, gently tickling its back. “Come on! Tickle, tickle, tickle! Come on. I know you wanna give it up. Just relax and let it out!” This ritual between ant and mealybug was an ancient behavior, millions of years in the making, and this ant here was an expert at this behavior called “honeydew milking”. Suddenly, the mealybug lifted its side appendages and gave up a sweet drop of honeydew, which the ant drank happily! The weaver ant continued to hang around the mealybug and periodically tickled it with its antennae to stimulate the mealybug to release its sweet honeydew, which is a byproduct created from digested plant sap. The ant continued to be rewarded for its patience and love for its pet mealybug. Other ants would periodically come by, and it would transfer the collected honeydew from its social stomach to that of the visiting ants so they could, in turn, bring the collected honeydew back up the vines to the nest.
It’s amazing that when looking at mealybugs in relation to the vines, one might consider the relationship a parasitic one, but add a third organism to the mix, ants, and suddenly the relationship is a type of symbiotic mutualism, where all organisms benefit from each other. The mealybugs get sap from the vines and protection from the ants, the vines get protection from the ants by luring them in with mealybugs and extra-floral nectaries, and the ants benefit from the food provided by the mealybugs and the vines. Isn’t nature just beautifully designed?
But not everything in nature is beautiful, for down below, something much more grim was taking place. Olivia, a weaver ant elder, had wandered onto the rainforest floor, where she knew things were much more dangerous for ants like her. She was weak as she crawled across a dead sister in the dried leaf litter. I noticed fungus was beginning to grow from her exoskeleton, which to me meant she hadn’t been keeping up with her hygiene duties and was now suffering the consequences, or her immune system was low due to old age. Either way, she knew her time had come and was now taking it upon herself to go to the community weaver ant graveyard, where dying weavers go to die.
A swarm of Gnome Ants, named the Gnomads, were seen everywhere, taking the dead and dying weavers home to eat. The Gnomads were having a literal feast on all these dead weavers! I was shocked at the sight and stood wide-eyed at the weaver ant graveyard-slash-Gnomad buffet. It was hard to watch, knowing that most of these weavers were still actually alive, as I could see them trying to fight back. They would not be dying in peace. The weavers were even dropping their dead from the vines above, and the fish in our pond were joyously relishing the gifts falling randomly from the skies. Other ants were also taking advantage of the feast. An Asian Bullet Ant had grabbed a cadaver and took it back home. This Asian Bullet Ant was dragging an ant that tried to cling on to a leaf to resist.
I spotted the location Olivia chose as her final resting place, among other dying sisters, where she was greeted by a team of Gnomads who were happy to find her. As sad as this was, this was the way of the forest. When one creature dies, the nutrients and stored energy within the dying animal’s tissues don’t go to waste, as it is used up by other creatures. You had to be quick, as the competition is tough, and speed plus efficiency could mean the difference between survival or starvation.
I knew that this was all evidence that our ecosystem was healthy, the fact that there was a diverse set of species that were in direct competition, dependent on other species in the forest, and no single species was dominating the resources. I hoped our rainforest would continue on this path, but the feeling that a single invasive species could totally upset this delicate balance within our rainforest hung over me like a dark cloud, and then I got it.
It was a text from Dr. General. What did he have to say about our mystery ant?
“Hi AC, thanks for the fuzzy pictures. Haha! It looks like Wasmannia auropunctata, but to be sure, could you please send a few ants to Perry Buenavente at the National Museum? Thanks!”
Aaahhh! What?! Wasmannia auropunctata?! No way! Guys, he was saying the ant looked like it was the notorious “Little Fire Ant,” a very invasive species also known as Electric Ants whose sting feels like being shocked by electricity, originally from South America, just like fire ants.
According to online sources, little fire ants have become extremely invasive worldwide due to their generalist diet, ability to thrive in a variety of habitat types, the fact that they can have multiple queens per colony, and due to their unique cloning abilities, which meant only one colony was enough to spur an entire population within a country. Having a population of little fire ants in our rainforest was just as bad as having fire ants!
But one thing stood out to me as peculiar. According to online sources, Wasmannia auropunctata have tiny workers measuring 1-1.5mm in body length. The ant I spotted was at least 4 mm in length, the size of a full-grown fire ant worker. But, as Dr. General had requested, I had to send a specimen to his partner at their lab in the museum, to verify the true identity of this mysterious red ant. My ultimate task now was to find an ant first, and catch it so it could be officially identified. I needed to know if this was indeed an invasive species. The fate of our rainforest and all its creatures depended on it.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t just do nothing. I felt the best way to combat the emergence of any invasives was to strengthen our existing ecosystem, and one way of doing so was to increase and support its biodiversity. And for that, I had more creatures to add. Let’s go up to Orchadia. Now a lot of you mentioned that I haven’t been featuring Orchadia much since it was built, and you’re right. The reason for this is because not a lot is going on up here yet, compared to Pandora, which has a much more established community of life, seeing as it was constructed months before Orchadia was. And because Orchadia was still young and lacks a proper soil layer up here, it will take a bit longer for a community to develop. It’s happening, just slowly. For now, there are a lot of crickets breeding up here in the trees, tree frogs sleeping in the foliage, and roaches.
The weavers, of course, were also frequenting the canopy, and they’ve even built a new leaf nest up here too, right by the fog where they can stay nice and humid. The black carpenter ants, which were moved in here since the start, have finally, after several long weeks, moved out of their AC Hybrid Nest Mini and somewhere into our canopy, which was great! I did see a pile of sawdust on the glass, so I tried to locate if they managed to bore a hole into one of the banyan branches, but I couldn’t spot where their hole was, but I did spot a couple of workers foraging, which was awesome! I think the black carpenter ants will do just fine in our rainforest. But, guys, I’ve got more creatures to add into our canopy to support our forest’s biodiversity and thus ecosystem up here in Orchadia, and I know you guys will love these new additions.
First, meet these giant click beetles. It seems to be their breeding season where I live, and so I captured a few of them to place into our canopy. They are absolutely massive click beetles with these cool feathered antennae.
[Music: Your Creator of Worlds is gunna rock your world…]
I placed the beetles into our rainforest. At first, they played dead, but slowly they woke up and began to crawl away.
Next, this gorgeous Orthopteran. It’s yet another species of bush cricket. It had a beautiful coloration and neat pattern on its back. This would be the third species of bush cricket in Orchadia now, and this particular species is known for its beautiful song. I couldn’t wait to hear him singing one of these nights. He looked so gorgeous on our Banyan tree.
Next, you may recognize this cricket. Well, they’re native to where I live, and I caught this female in my yard. It’s the wild type of Acheta crickets, the species commonly available in the pet trade for reptiles. This is what their wild form looks like. I released it into Orchadia and hoped it was pregnant so it could hopefully start a population of Acheta in our rainforest.
It was then that I spotted a giant. Arachnophobes, look away!
My, my! Well, who do we have here? It was a huge huntsman spider, but this one was special. It wasn’t Lady Death Strike, who we knew was living in our rainforest. This was a male. So handsome. Ha! And you look just like your father, too. Congratulations for making it to adulthood, Sir. Strangely, it looked like he was covered in some webbing. I wonder if it had gotten tangled in some web. Actually, there were plenty of spiders up here in Orchadia. I spotted a cool jumping spider nearby, checking out the weaver ants all around. Also, Charlotte, an orb weaver, was also living somewhere up here in Orchadia, but I wasn’t sure where she was now, as it had been a couple of weeks since I’d seen her. The presence of active predators like this was also a promising sign of a healthy ecosystem, and…
Oh, man! The mystery ant!
I looked at our culprit within the vial. It couldn’t keep still as it tried to look for an escape, so I added a drop of honey to get a better look at it.
Will ya look at you? What a cute specimen. Looking at it now as it drank from the honey, I was certain this wasn’t a fire ant. It kinda reminded me of one of the first species of ants I ever kept while still living in Canada, known as Myrmica rubra, also known as the European Fire ant, which is also invasive. The shape of the body also kinda looked like a type of Tetramorium, the same genus as our Dwarf Ants, as well as another popular North American ant I used to keep called pavement ants, most known for the massive ant wars they have alongside sidewalks in the summer. I know you Americans and Canadians know exactly what I’m talking about. Could you be a “Little Fire Ant”? My instincts still told me it was something else. But whatever it was, we would soon be finding out once Dr. General and his partner Perry analyze it.
I felt a bit sad because I knew this innocent ant would need to be killed in order to be properly mounted, prior to being examined under a microscope for identification. I’m sorry, little one, but you will have to give up your life today for science and to save my rainforest. At least, it would be dying with a full stomach. I sent it off to the museum and hoped for some promising news.
Meanwhile, I sent newer, clearer photos of the specimen to Dr. General, and to my surprise, he said that sadly, the ant still looked like Wasmannia auropunctata, but we both knew the final verdict would come down to the moment that they could see the ant in person at the lab.
In the night, the rainforest was still. It was a training session with Godzilla, who was waiting in the pond for the goods. I threw in a roach, and he lunged, happily swallowing my gift. He was beginning to see me as a friend with the roaches, which was a good thing, especially as he gets older.
All the roaches emerged to party and feed at this time. The isopods also came out of hiding. I spotted one of our canopy crabs emerging to begin its nightly search for edibles along the forest floor. I spotted a cute beetle on the glass, yet another one of those species I never knew was living in our rainforest, introduced by way of the plants or decor.
Underground, I spotted a mass of baby centipedes huddled in a ball, protected by their mother. It’s just crazy to think about how much life was propagating in our rainforest without me knowing. It made me think about how much is actually going on outside in the wild, below our feet, and around us that we aren’t able to witness and see.
It made me so grateful to have embarked on this crazy journey of discovery that came with this whole biological project of our majestic slice of rainforest in glass. I feel the amount of knowledge we’ve been able to acquire, the scenes we’ve been able to witness, and the insight we’ve gotten into the secrets of Mother Nature could not have been achieved had we attempted to film all this stuff in the wild. Pandora and Orchadia have both shed an invaluable amount of insight on the ways of the natural world, and I felt so grateful in this moment. It pained me to think that a single species might be responsible for this whole project, our rainforest ecosystem, to fall apart. I mean, if an invasive species did proliferate here, leading to the dying out of multiple species and the collapse of the ecosystem, I wondered what I would do next. Where would I go from here? If I had to terminate this project, into which I was already so deep into, how do I even go back to learning about nature in any other way? Keeping animals in naturalistic vivaria has brought about a whole new dimension of learning. Being able to have the unique opportunity to learn about our organisms in the full context in which they exist in nature was like understanding how a single gear piece works by looking at its place within the whole machine within which it operates. I still had so many more plans ahead for additional vivaria, so we could continue to learn more. I couldn’t have the project end here, not this soon. There was still so much more I wanted to learn.
The next day, I got a text. It was Perry, and what he said shocked me:
“The specimen you sent is Tetramorium insolens. 😊”
He went on to say that upon seeing it in the vial, prior to even mounting it for microscope analysis, he already had suspicions it wasn’t a Little Fire Ant as suspected, seeing as it was too big. Examining it up close, Perry and Dr. General were able to narrow it down to Tetramorium, and later to the species Tetramorium insolens.
Yay! So it wasn’t a fire ant nor a little fire ant after all! What a relief that was, seeing as now I didn’t have to worry about exterminating it from the vivarium. So our mystery ant was related to our native dwarf ants and to pavement ants of North America. I was happy to keep it in our rainforest and learn more about them.
I texted Perry and Dr. General, thanking them for the great news and how relieved I was that they weren’t an invasive species. I couldn’t wait to watch the colony grow more and more in Orchadia and learn more about this cool species.
So, it looks like the inhabitants of Orchadia and Pandora are safe for now. My heart was so full as I watched the various species of animals in the forest going about their lives not knowing that I, along with many people from around the world, were secretly looking out and rooting for them, following their stories, and loving them.
I wanted to give a special thanks to Dr. General and to… What? Hang on. A text… From Perry… [gasp]