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Thanks for the reply armyoforigin! :) I did do alot of reading on the Diversus before I got them and thought I would attempt to keep them even being warned by quite a few different people the difficulties of keeping them! I thought I had got past the hardest part, i've had them for over a month now, just a shame about the mites :( I was starting to feel a bit negative about keeping ants as there seems nothing that can be done about these parasitic mites, they just seemed to appear out of nowhere, but thinking more about it I wont let it put me off! The other thing is I would be inclined to try them again if they died as I like them so much, I would possibly rethink my setup though :p Also I have been tempted by a few different species of ant but i'll leave that out for a bit whilst I concentrate on the Diversus! Thanks again!
Sorry to post again so soon, but there seems to have been a signifacant change within my colony! For the last two days, there were ants heavily infested with parasitic mites, trying to rub the mites off of their bodies and a really weak feeding response with only a small amount of workers collecting the food. Today when I put food in the feeding repsonse was VERY aggressive, hundreds of workers and even soldiers. Obviously all these ants coming to get the food gave me a chance to get a good look at the ants. Whilst looking at the ants there was not one ant I could see that was heavily infested, I was struggling to even see the parasitic mites, I looked at the soldiers too and they were fine which suprised me, the other day they were looking pretty bad so there is definitely an improvement. I really hope i'm not talking too soon but since the A. Cucumeris went in the colony seems to have improved. Thanks for reading
That sounds really positive!
I hope things continue to look up! =)
Thanks! It really suprised me, the other day I was expecting most of the soldiers too die due to how infested they were but they look very good now! Fingers crossed it carries on imprving!
Sounds very positive, this is good news.
The ants still look good today, yesterday they took about ten small roaches and some small crickets so they still have their appetite!
I was getting confused with the mites though, the A. Cucumeris I mean. In my earlier post when I said they were releasing from the sachets, the ones I thought were releasing from the sachets were like the ones I wrote about in an earlier post, bulbous, jet black and good at jumping but I didn't think anything of it. Looking at the ants last night I saw hundreds of orange speckles and it turns out these are actually the A. Cucumeris mites and the ones I thought were coming out of the sachet are the ones I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Does anyone have any idea what they could be? I would look it up myself but I don't know much about mites so don't know where to start.
I would put them down as parasitic mites but these mites are wondering around instead of latched onto somthing. I also see different sizes, varying from 0.5mm-2mm and if these were the parasitic ones surely the smaller ones would be latched onto the ants instead of wondering? The big ones definitely aren't latched onto anything because there atleast half the size of the workers and I would notice if they were latched on due to the size, but maybe the parasitic mites are the smaller ones of these, I have no idea.
If anyone knows anything about these I would appreciate any info on them!
Thanks again for reading.
Not sure but quite often cultures would contain food for the culture to stay alive so perhaps thats what the other mites are, just food. Only a theory.
These other mites have been there for a while, I remember seeing one a couple weeks ago. There's not many of them either which seems strange, I'm going to try and look into it further but it's going be hard with all the different species of mites, aswell as my lack of knowledge on mite species. If I find out what these mites are though, I'll be sure to post!
So I've got a little test going now, I found two heavily infested workers during feeding tonight, I have put them in a tub with alot of the Amblyseius Cucumeris and I'm really interested in whether anything would have happened by tomorrow. I've also caught one of these 'mystery mites' so I can get a closer look, I've already seen that it has two body segments, head and abdomen if that can narrow it down a bit further. I'm also starting to question whether it is actually a mite......
It will be interesting to hear what you find out, mite identification isn't easy and when I have a search the identification 'keys' involve features I can only assume you need a microscope to see (E.g where are their hairs!), mites all just look like little dots to me! lol