ANTSTORE World of Ants

[jartok]

JUST ORDERED SOME Harpegnathos venator any advice on care or anything my first none hibernation ants and they was not cheap

thanks

[jbc]

No info about them but next time you order ants get info about them all you can get and talk with people in the forum.

[SteveUK28]

Where did you get them from Jartok?

[jartok]

well i am capable of keeping them just doesnt hurt to ask for personal experience in my mind - only issue i am finding is how to clean the ytong up with cricket parts i added a few small woodlice to go in as a cleanup crew the ants seem to not be bothered by them either - steve i messaged u

[baumarkthammer]

The main problem isn´t the state the nest is in. The ants like to keep all kind of trash inside the nest. Harpegnathos saltator was also called the wallpapering ant because it never carries the rests of the pupae outside and distribute them around the nest. Sometimes they also do the same with rests of crickets but those parts are mainly some clean chitin rests.
The real problem is that they take the crickets in the nest and clean them there. There seems to be a kind of mite that is in every Harpegnathos venator colony I have ever red about and mine had them, too. They don´t suck on the ants, they only sit on the mandibles and the eyes and wait until the ant eats something and then suck on the crickets. The larvae also can somehow can be kept clean but when the larvae starts to pupate the mites can suck on the morphing larvae that is now not longer able to move very much, so there is a high possibility that the pupae dies.

You can try to find some english publications of the nestbuilding behavior of Harpegnathos venator... however I didn´t find any.
I once did a research for school (had to have about 12 pages and was one half of my grade at the end of the year in biology), but it was about Harpegnathos saltator which strangley are much better known than Harpegnathos venator which in contrast to Harpegnathos saltator have a wide distribution area across Asia while Harpegnathos saltator only lives in India and isn´t very common there.

The nests of Harpegnathos saltator are build very complex. There is only one nestchamber where the ants live, underneath this chamber there is another chamber that allows water what gets into the nest to go away and also the ants sometimes seem to throw rubbish in there. Around the main chamber there is a tunnle that isn´t connected to the main chamber, it probably is made for water regulation during the raintime.
The nestbuilding behavior of those two species is probably very much alike though I couldn´t make any experiments with my colony.
The social structure of the colony should be very much alike, too, there should also be gamergates and the nests probably will barley raise over 100 workers. The ants will only be active at day and only coordinate with their eyesight.

[jartok]

yes they generally dont do much at night. thanks for letting me know what the mites actually do too the larvae i did add a few tiny woodlice which are pretty effective normally in cleaning so hopefully they will sort that out. i believe the saltator are pretty much the same just venator are more suseptable too mites and get more stressed easier - anyone ever thought of adding predatory mites once and a while ? they only eat other mites and then they die once no food