Urgent Help Needed!! Ants Poisoned

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Urgent Help Needed!! Ants Poisoned

Beitragvon Antagoniser » 26. Mär 2013 17:08

Hello guys I'm in need of advice.

2 days ago my colony of Messor arenarius ratus arrived with 9 workers and a few brood.
They're kept in a test tube covered in a red filter and that is placed inside an empty Tupperware box.
The escape prevention that I've used is just talcum powder on the top 2 inches around the box.
1 test tube of water and 1 test tube of wild bird seed mix.
1 dead Dubia Roach(from my own breeder stock) and half of a grape.

Now for the first few minutes everything looked great, three ants came out and started foraging around so I went downstairs for 30 minutes.
When I returned however two of my ants looked as though they had lost their minds.( thrashing they're body around and rubbing up against the floor, a few of their limbs were now not moving whatsoever and they were biting into fin air wildly.)
Later these two ants could no longer move and are completely disabled on the floor. Later another ant inside the test tube started becoming like a rabid dog.

I removed the queen from the Tupperware box, isolated the crazy drunk disabled workers.
Then I poured Hot scolding kettle water over the entire formicarium including water and seed tubes.

The queen was added back to the Tupperware and everything seemed fine.

Today however there is another worker acting crazy and now I'm worried that this entire colony could collapse.

just 1 day has passed and 4/9 workers are twitching disabled on their backs(not dead).
Temperature range is 24-27 Celsius.

My suspicion is that the seeds may be toxic but surly that's not the case if these are for birds.

Help and advice will be appreciated (alternatives to seeds - oats or peanut butter?)
Dateianhänge
Ant formicarium.jpg
How the setup looks
Ant formicarium.jpg (8.54 KiB) 2520-mal betrachtet
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Antagoniser
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Re: Urgent Help Needed!! Ants Poisoned

Beitragvon Antagoniser » 28. Mär 2013 18:22

OK everything is fine now that I removed the mixed wild bird seeds that were purchased from B&Q.

They're accepting oats and dandelion seeds now and 1 Dubia Roach was appreciated by the whole colony last night.

The crazy workers that were isolated returned back to the colony and have regained sanity.

Only one ant died but I'm very relieved.

Messor Arenarius are very beautiful ants and I would recommend them to anyone. =D>
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Re: Urgent Help Needed!! Ants Poisoned

Beitragvon AntsNational » 6. Mai 2013 19:40

I'm VERY happy to hear that your ants recovered! Sometimes foreign foods can have this effect on ants, I've had a similar problem with my Atta cephalotes colony. They seem to get "sick" when cutting up a dandelion and other yellow flowers so I removed the flowers. The colony is fine now and the workers have gone back to business as usual. This was about a month ago and I think I lost 20 of 2000 workers (not a big loss at all). This is a good learning experience for us all. Thanks for sharing & good luck with your colony.
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