Pavement Ants (Tetramorium) | AntsCanada Tutorial

In some cases, animals and humans can share the same space. Humans produce leftovers, which offer food to raccoons, birds, even rats, and other vermin. Humans alter the natural landscape by building homes and cities, which displace some wildlife but make it perfect for others. One such animal we will look at in this episode of the AntsCanada Ant Channel is a little tiny creature that has adapted well to human life. It’s an insect many of us see around sidewalks, driveways, and streets, and as such, we have dubbed them pavement ants, known scientifically as Tetramorium.

For most people, pavement ants are known as those little brown ants that we sometimes see in huge masses above ground. For us ant keepers, they are explosive little packages of ferocity and colony loyalty that engage in epic ant wars in the wild and make amazing pet ants. I waited for this date to upload this video because I know many of you managed to catch your pavement ant queens this year, and you now have your queens in test tubes, and some of you may be welcoming your very first round of nanitics—your first workers. Congratulations, guys!

Tetramorium ants happen to be my favorite ants to keep in North America, and I will explain why throughout this video, so keep watching until the end. This is a tutorial video on how to keep pavement ants as pets. Let’s start with pavement ant biology.

In North America, there are a few species of Tetramorium, and there’s still work needed to be done on determining species, so for the purposes of this video, I will refer to the North American pavement ants as Tetramorium species e, and the European ones as Tetramorium caespitum. Their care is exactly the same, so don’t worry too much about names.

Pavement ants happen to be invasive ants, which means they’ve been imported from another place, in this case likely by human activities like the transport of plants, soil, etc. It’s believed that Tetramorium ants originated in Asia and then spread to Europe and North America. Now, before you start freaking out because you have a Tetramorium queen and are concerned about keeping an invasive ant species, don’t worry too much. These ants, for the most part, are naturalized invaders, which means they’ve managed to adapt well to human settlement and have integrated themselves and found their balance in our urban ecosystem, kind of like pigeons. Unlike fire ants, which simply kill and displace lots of native ant species and are a cause of ecological harm in many areas of the world, for many reasons, pavement ants are not under most governments’ radars. Keeping pavement ants, in my book, is okay.

Now, I hear that scientists aren’t really sure if the Tetramorium ants in North America are the same species as the European Tetramorium caespitum, or if they’re a completely different species, so pavement ants here in North America are often called Tetramorium species e until taxonomists figure it out.

Let’s talk about housing. One of the things that I love about pavement ants is that they are so easy to house. Being highly adaptive to the varying niches of human environments means they tolerate a wide variety of conditions. If you’re going to try your hand at creating a formicarium for your ants for the first time, these are the ants to try it on. If you were looking for a perfectly designed formicarium for Tetramorium ants, I would recommend the AC Tetramorium Hybrid Nest from our store, tailored specifically for pavement ants, or the AC Omni Nest with a digging medium placed inside for comfort. These ants like nests with tighter tunnels with varying nest humidity. They like moderately dry nests, and I recommend a nest that is about 30 to 40% moist and the rest dry. A hydration gradient is key for these ants.

Obviously, if you’re a subscriber to this channel, you already know that when you first catch a queen, she should be in a test tube setup. Click this iCard here for more information on how to make a test tube setup for queen ants. Pavement ant queens are fully claustral, so they don’t need food during the stage when she is raising her first set of workers.

Which brings me to my next point: the second thing I love about Tetramorium ants is that they have such fast-growing colonies. It takes about one month for a Tetramorium ant to go from egg to worker, and the queens lay so many eggs at a time, constantly laying and producing impressive amounts of brood. On this channel, I have a Tetramorium playlist where I trace the development of a Tetramorium colony starting from when I first caught her up until her colony reached 3 years of age, and by then, they were a colony of several thousand. Here is the typical Tetramorium timeline: one week after capture, one year after capture, two years.

So, you see, pavement ants have fast-growing colonies. Also worth noting: the warmer you keep your pavement ants, the faster they grow. If you can’t keep them in an extra warm room in your home, you can attach a heating cable to one side of the nest so the ants can have a warm and cool spot to choose from in their formicarium. If you have a hybrid nest, just stick your heating cable into this portal, and you don’t have to worry.

The third thing I love about Tetramorium is that they have such voracious appetites. They feed with gusto on insects. They have little stingers, which they use to immobilize their prey and subdue them by swarming. Provide them with a lot of freshly killed feeder insects like mealworms, superworms, crickets, and feeder cockroaches. Click on this iCard for a tutorial on feeding insects to ants. These ants also need carbohydrates in the form of sugar foods like honey, sugar water, hummingbird nectar, and fruit. These ants are also semi-granivorous, so they love grains, nuts, and seeds. Mine loved sesame seeds and nuts of all kinds. Place all food in their outworld.

I found Vaseline to be an efficient barrier at keeping the pavement ants inside their outworld. You can also use baby powder mixed with rubbing alcohol. Be sure to clean their garbage and graveyard frequently. Another thing to note is that I found these ants don’t do so well in tubing that is too steep. They aren’t exactly climbing-type ants, so try to keep your tubing as horizontal as possible. Gradual slopes are okay; steep slopes and perfectly smooth tubing—not so much.

These ants will hibernate in the winter, so keep them at at least 10°C, starting from November to February. The queen will start laying eggs earlier in the new year than most ants, which gives Tetramorium a bit of an edge against other ants. They really have fast-growing colonies.

I look forward to all of you new Tetramorium owners discovering why I and many ant keepers love keeping pavement ants as pets. They are easy to keep, highly adaptive, good eaters, and have fast-growing colonies. They’re also aggressive to prey items but harmless to humans. To me, they are the best ants for both beginners and experienced ant keepers alike.

Thanks so much for watching this video. Don’t forget to subscribe, like, share, and comment. I try to answer as many comments as I can, and stay tuned for next week’s video. It’s ant love forever. Bye-bye!

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