I have ants!

[desertanimal]

Hi all,

If any of you are science teachers, you may be interested in these details, which is why I'm posting them.

This coming school year, I will be doing an NSF fellowship that places me in a 7th/8th grade science classroom two days a week. The purpose of the program is to help bring "real science" to the GK-12 classroom and to expose grad. students (who will become science professors, themselves) to real teaching. For this fellowship, we are expected to create a few inquiry-based lessons. Since I am a behaviorist by trade, I'm going to focus on ants, because they are socially complex but manipulable, and easily accessible--you can find them anywhere. As a part of introducing the students to ants and observational techniques before they have to do their own project, I am going to maintain an ant colony in the classroom for the year. I just got my starter colony today, and I wanted to share how easy it is, if you know an ant researcher who will give you a queen or two!

Right now, the colony consists of two queens (from a species of harvester ants that will cooperatively found colonies in some populations), 4 larvae, and it looks like a few eggs (I don't have a hand lens yet, and it's really hard to see!). These queens were collected over the July 4th weekend by the ant lab who works with this species. Right now, I will feed them Kentucky Blue grass seeds (you can use other types of seeds, and I hope my students will come up with the idea of seeing what they like/don't) and an occassional fruit fly. Because the colony is so small and the queens are caring for their brood, they just get fed in the next box. When the colony has workers that can go further afield to forage, I can attach other boxes to the nest box using tubing, and can place forage in those instead of in the nest box. At that stage, I will also offer them cricket parts, and I suspect I'll try some mealworm sections to see if they like those.

The brood chamber is simply a test tube with water in the bottom, blocked off by a cotton ball. That gives them a place with sufficient humidity to raise the brood. Once there are workers, I will fill the other two test tubes in the same manner, so that when the one dries out, there will be another suitable brood chamber available. The colony will move the brood, and I'll be able to refill the depleted test tube. The test tubes rest in depressions in a base of paster of Paris slightly angled upward.

I just got them today. I'm really excited about it! I was really pleasantly surprised at how easy the set-up is! And, harvester ants are crappy climbers of smooth surfaces, so I could even vent the brood box to a large basin if I wanted to be able to let them forage over a larger surface area than just a set of connected boxes. But I like how connected boxes will allow you to make the ants "make choices" about food in one versus the other and things like that. I'm totally psyched.

The main limitation for doing something similar with a species of ant in your area (this set-up would probably work for most species, except for the leaf-cutters, because their fungus is really sensitive to humidity levels and are a little bit more difficult to maintain because of it), is finding a queen. However, if you can find yourself a local ant-researcher or even enthusiast, those people know where and when to be out when various species of ants make their nuptial flights. At that time, you can just pick a bunch up when they land, place them in test tubes, take them home, set them up, and see which ones get started.

Also, your local university may well have an ant lab, and those people would probably be more than willing to help out a science teacher. I'll keep this thread updated as the colony grows!