Ant-Man; Now with more ants

You can read part one (Myremecology-Man) here. I'd recommend it, you'd probably understand a little bit better what I'm writing about today!

A quick recap;

• I went to see Ant-Man, it was pretty good, but there were a few niggly bits that caught me regarding the ants' behaviour.
• They concentrated on 4 species; fire ants, bullet ants, crazy ants and carpenter ants. Today is crazy ant and carpenter ant time.
• There was too much Hank Pym. Boo, hiss.

Today's specialty is part two; cool critters called C cognomens*.

Hey look, a .gif with both species of the day. Fancy!

*I had to thesaurus that. Cognomen means 'nicknames". 

Crazy ants

First up, we have the crazy ants. Before you ask, yes, they are actually a thing, and yes, they are called crazy ants. Obviously catering to an American audience, Marvel picked the four species most people would know of; although the UK probably laughs at this one, as they do sound like they're made up. Nylanderia fulva doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily though. 

Crazy ants are called crazy because they act very erratically when disturbed, freaking out all over the place. The ones in the film are probably Rasberry crazy ants (I am not making this up, I swear); other species within this family are Yellow crazy ants and Longhorn crazy ants. 

Close encounters of the ant kind

The anatomy looks pretty much dead-on for the crazy ants if you compare with the film's screencaps, which is really nice to see. They're the smallest ants of the film, and very yellow in comparison to the others; the only ones that could get mixed up are the fire ants, although they're a bit more orangey. 

Image from Youngzine.org

As you can see, they have very long legs in comparison to the others species, and are covered in short hairs across the entire body, especially the lower legs. A credit goes to the Marvel team here, as they really did study these ants and get even these small details down; you can see in the following screencap those distinctive hairs along the tarsus of the central leg.

Aw, he's adorable!

To continue on the lines of the almost-absurd nature of crazy ants, they're labelled as the ones that 'control electricity' in Ant-Man. And amazingly, it's actually true. Well, to an extent. Crazy ants don't control electricity or conduct it like they say they do, but there is a massive problem with crazy ants shorting out electrical equipment. For some insane reason they like to try and colonise the spaces inside electricals (such as plug sockets and air conditioning units), swarming inside the tiny spaces. They don't create nests, instead moving around and colonising small spaces as they go. When they all try and cram into a tiny space like the inside of a plug socket, the contact between the bodies causes the plug to short circuit between electrical contacts. It also kills all the ants. They release an alarm pheremone (probably mixed with a burning smell...) which attracts more ants, which then swarm even more, and fill up your standby computer with a lot of very antsy (see what I did there?) insects.

Not what you want to see when you're booting up for a day of Tumblr

Basically, they're pretty metal invaders. Take a moment to breathe now and thank your lucky stars they've not made it to the UK.

Carpenter Ants

Finally, we have the species that should probably be labelled as the most popular species in Ant-Man. Carpenter ants are the big guys, 'ideal for ground and air transport'. They're in the same genus as the Honeypot ant, one of the grossest (and therefore, are really fascinating) ants ever. A quick diversion; these guys gorge some workers with food, so their abdomens swell up into massive food stores (a condition called plerergate), and they can feed the rest of the colony. Ew.

They look kinda like water balloons ready to pop

Not much use to Ant-Man though. The carpenter ants that we do see, we meet one star of the show. Anthony, the loyal steed of our hero.

Yee-haw!

This bro is Anthony. Or, to be more accurately, this lady is Anthony. Or it might be Antony, I'm not entirely sure. Either way, Scott Lang calls her a boy the entire time, and she certainly is not. Anthony is actually most likely to be a queen ant; in an ant colony, there are three types of ant;

1. Worker ants; these are all female (who knew, Ant-Man is actually a female dominated film, despite there being like only one human female character) and have a range of jobs.
2. Male ants; these do have wings, but their sole purpose is to fertilize the female. Then they cop it. Males are fairly useless in the massive colony world.
3. Queen ants; these girls are bigger than worker ants and males, have wings, and are the centre of the nest- they're egg layers, mass-producing new workers. That doesn't mean they 'control' the other ants though.

Every year, when you see the masses of ants swarming all over the ground, with winged ones in their midst; that's the day that virgin queens fly. Bees work in a very similar way; the queen picks her day, leaves the nest to fly, and all the males follow her in a big chase to be the one to mate with her. 

Where are we all going again?

So you could question why all the ants follow Scott in all those neat flying scenes. He's obviously gone some of that sweet queen-in-heat pheremone stashed in his suit somewhere.

Everybody loves Anthony though, which is something you never would have expected. Ants? Ew. Ants are gross. Not when you give them a name and treat them a little bit like a giant ugly puppy! So much so, Anthony has gone big- and even managed to get a toy made of herself. Now there's a privilege restricted to pretty much every other superheroine.

Buy me like 10 for my birthday.

Okay, I think I'm done. Phew, you can stop thinking about ants now. Unless you're about to go see the film, in which case, GLHF. Have a comic before you go!

Myremecology-Man; science of Ant-Man

Probably not the story of blog post you'd expect to see from my blog, given how outdoorsy it normally is, but there you go. Yesterday I went to see Ant-Man in the cinema, and was actually quite impressed, not only with the plot, but with the accuracy of the ants. Yes, if you go see a film called Ant-Man, there are going to be ants.

A few mild spoilers to follow here and there, but mostly to do with ant behaviour.

A cleverly disguised spoiler bar

So, as Hank Pym (officially one of my most disliked characters*) states, there are 4 different ant species used in the film. Let's get our lineup...

1. Fire ants, the builders.
2. Bullet ants, Paraponera clavata, the ones with the nasty sting.
3. Crazy ants -the boyfriend laughed and didn't believe they were a thing until I started correcting the science to him afterwards- the electric ones.
4. Carpenter ants, the flying ones.

Quite a nice mixture, and certainly all familiar to an American audience; less so to a British one, but bullet and fire ants aren't unrecognizable. There was actually quite a lot of ant action to be had throughout the film, which was a nice surprise. I thought there would be a lot more general superhero action, rather than actual cool ant stuff.

*So much so I almost didn't go and see it, but was convinced by the trailers that he wouldn't have much part in it. I was wrong. Why couldn't there be Janet in there instead?

I'm going to break this one down into two parts; fire ants and bullet ants today, and then crazy ants and carpenter ants another day. Probably I'll do a further post on other miscellaneous stuff I want to mention too, like pheromones, after that, but who knows.

Fire ants

These guys were described as being great at building. The fact that they, like bullet ants, have a killer bite wasn't recognized,  but I think they were trying to simplify for those who didn't know ants (ie, the rest of the cinema) to one major fact per species.

They put the fire ants' building ability to good use though- the one I appreciated most was when they built a raft to float down a water tunnel on. This is one of the coolest protective abilities of fire ants; in nature, they have been recorded making giant rafts out of their own bodies when nests are flooded, allowing the colony to float away with the queen in the middle, and survive extreme flood events. They are able to build bridges as well, so that was cool to see, although it was quite a sooped-up, extra fast build and reform they did in the film.

Get me out of here! I'm standing on a pile of ants!

They were nice and small in comparison to the other species shown, which was happily right! Their colouring came up nicely as well, so they were easily recognizable against the more often seen carpenter ants.

Their nests aren't exactly like the ones in the picture above; they're much more triangular in shape. Because fire ants are a bit of a pest in the States, they're freely exterminated. Some people like to make art out of their nests though, which really shows off the architecture they create underground...

Not the nicest way to go

Bullet ants

Paraponera clavata, the name mangled all of too many times for my ears to cope. It probably was only about twice though, so perhaps I should give credit for trying... and the film writers actually including a latin name for one of the species. These guys were rightly labelled as the 'really painful' ones.

Oh man, and these guys bite. On the Schmidt Insect Pain Index they sit happily at the very top end. The Schmidt Index runs from 0-4, 0 being something unable to feel, to 4, which is agony. Lovely. Unfortunately Marvel got a bit confused here and labelled bullet ants as 1, but never mind.

Otherwise known as, the bad insect pets scale

These guys really can cause as much pain as was shown in the film, and Scott was pretty wise to really want to step on any of them. Really not a good species to annoy. Not only is their sting absolute agony, the pain lasts for up to 24 hours, so you are really feeling it long-term if you get on the bad side of one of these beasties. Luckily, they're pretty huge, some workers getting up to 1.2 inches long, so you're not likely to miss one if it's running around. 

They can get literally this big

In one tribe in the Amazon, the initiation to become an adult is to stick your hand in a glove full of bullet ants. No thanks. 

That's all for now, although I will eventually get down to writing a part two. For now, go watch the film so I can reference more stuff in the future!

Little Sea and Studland

It's been quiet on Dendrocopos lately because I've been really busy with lots of exciting new life changes! In short, I've just quit my old admin job, started a new field studies job, passed my driving test, and done lots of travelling up and down the country. Now I'm based down in Dorset, teaching geography in Purbeck for the next 6 months.

Studland

The most exciting adventure of this week (so far, it's only tuesday) has been a trip to Studland and Little Sea with my parents. Studland is a peninsula created over 300 years from blown sand, forming distinct dune systems with ridges and slumps. Without going into too much geological detail (mostly because I am not an expert on it!) Studland is made up from deposits of sand, silt and gravel from the sea, which has built up over years and years of deposition. Heathland has grown over the area today, creating a unique environment perfect for studying blown sand formations.

Image from Southampton Geology

I'm pretty familiar with Studland as it was my main research site for my dissertation! I spent about 3 months looking at wood ant nests (very closely, getting covered in ants a lot)... which is what half of this post is about! It was quite a warm day today, which meant that some of my favourite residents of Studland were active- which actually was quite surprising for me, as although the sun was out, I didn't think it would be quite warm enough for the insane numbers of Formica rufa we saw about their nests.

Ant swarms! This actually makes sense for the time of year- it's the warmest it's been for a couple of weeks today, so they've all come out to swarm and make new nests. Interestingly, on the first active nest we found, there were only ants in a select few places on the actual nest material, clustered mainly in a south easterly direction, where the sun was at that point in time! You can sort of see this in the picture above, with air holes as well where ventilation of the nest was taking place due to the massive numbers of ants clustered in one part.

Glorious microfauna

Moving on from this first nest, which was a teeming mass (to put it lightly), we moved on to one of the hides on Studland to have a quick look around to see what birds were on the lake. On the walk down to the hide, we came across this monster of a nest- not only is the nest the very dark mass of ants (literally, that's just ants!), but to the right as well, the huge flattish pine needle area. You can actually only see half of it, and there were trails all over the place as well- I'm balancing on the log there because it was the only place I could stand for more than a second and not get absolutely coated all over my legs with interested foragers and upset soldiers!

The best animals to pet

Eventually we moved on from this spectacle to take a wander down to the hide. It's tucked quite away from the road, so not many people really know about it, which makes it a pretty nice spot. There isn't a whole lot to see a lot of the time, unless you sit there for ages with a pair of strong binoculars, but there is a diary that people write their sightings in, so if you're lucky you can see marsh harrier and some nice ducks like pintail and little grebe (or dabchick). We saw a couple of great crested grebe and a couple of cormorants- and then hit the jackpot.

One of the lesser known residents of Little Sea are otters. We've been going out to this hide for the past 18 months or so (basically since we first heard about it being a good spot to otter watch), and have never seen even a tail, only the records in the aforementioned diary that there had been sightings. The last one was January 30th, so we didn't really think we'd spot one. But then, just as we were about to pack up and head off, black ripples in the water! Not just one otter, but a whole family of them swimming across the lake!

 The picture's not fantastic, but there they are! Will definitely have to be heading back again in the future to see if we can spot them again, and actually remember to take binoculars next time...

The day I fell in a bog

I was in Guildford for the weekend visiting my boyfriend- with sunday being pretty good weather (November, and didn't need coats! Not expecting a snowy winter this year...) we decided to head out on an adventure and see what we could find
Heading north out of Burpham (where his flat is), we walked along Clay Lane towards Jacob's Well and Worpleston. The area was completely new to us; the only reason we knew of Worplesdon is because the train from Woking stops at Worplesdon sometimes. There are vegetables growing on the platform too, which is pretty cute.

About halfway between Burpham and Worplesdon is Whitmoor Common, our adventure spot of the day. Whitmoor Common is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) on the edge of the Bagshot Beds, a sandy soil formation. A mix of sandy and peaty soil means that there's a mixture of dry and wet heathland plants on higher and lower areas. It's fairly big, and pretty boggy in the winter- especially this Sunday, when it had just rained all day Saturday. We had to take a couple of backtracks heading into the common, because it was just absolutely impassable without wellies! The mud and puddles meant I got some pretty cool macro shots with my camera though.

Despite balancing somewhat precariously to take these, it wasn't until we were walking back along this path a bit further up that I fell over. I was pretty lucky that I mostly just got a bit wet, and not absolutely coated in mud. We carried on though, finding a slightly less sodden path- and a rope swing too, which we quickly took advantage of!

Heathlands always have very diverse flora; there are the big plants like heather (and each heather is slightly different- you don't have just 'heather', there's also bell heather, cross-leaf heath and ling, so quite a range!) and a few trees like silver birch. It's very easy to miss the smaller plants though, that are extremely varied once you actually start looking. It's the smaller plants that allow such a high diversity of other organisms to survive on heathlands too- bees, ants and other insects really depend on smaller plants.

The heath turns into wet woodland at the northern edge. Perhaps it wasn't supposed to be quite as wet as it actually was. The lichen makes quite nice patterns on the north side of trees where it's colder and moister; there's less on the southern side of trees because it's more prone to drying out in bright sunshine.

You can see the orange lichen on the north side of the trees

By the time we made it out of the woods, it was starting to get quite cold and dark- the evenings draw in so quick these days! Just made it home before a few drips of rain.

AES Insect Show 2014

One of the big insect events on my calendar has always been the Amateur Entomologists Society (AES) October show at Kempton Park racecourse. Because I've been at uni for the past 3 years, unfortunately I've not actually been able to go for ages- but this year, now I've graduated (argh!), I've not been up in Birmingham this weekend, and was able to go! Annoyingly, the weather was pretty horrendous, which made getting there and back a bit tricky, although the show itself is thankfully indoors. We managed to just about avoid the rain!

The AES show happens once every year, and basically it's an entomologist's heaven. Both floors of the building are packed out with stalls, selling a range of live and pinned insects (and spiders, plenty of tarantulas), books, art, shells and scientific equipment like nets, collecting jars and the like. It's pretty fantastic, and I've not come across anything else to quite the same scale or quite the same focused interest on insects.

The favourites to sell I think perhaps goes to the tarantulas (there are a lot of spider stands), but there are also tons of snails, millipedes, stick insects, praying mantids... and a couple of other rarer things, like katydids, grasshoppers, scorpions and hermit crabs. There were some pretty impressive boxes of snails, that kept trying to escape out the sides!

As a member of the Phasmid Study Group (PSG), I always make a bit of a beeline towards their stand at this show. Especially since I haven't been able to get to their meetings quite as regularly recently (again, due to being in Birmingham for university), it was quite nice to check out how the stand looked, and who was hanging around. Nice to see some of the old familiar faces.

 

One of the most popular things to sell at the AES meeting is pinned out insects- beetles and especially butterflies make up the bulk of these. There are some lovely blue morpho butterflies, atlas and other exotics, as well as native peacocks and the common brown species; wall, meadow and speckled wood. There was one stall that was selling pinned bullet and fire ants, which sold out of the larger soldiers very quickly after we got there and had a bit of a wander round.

I'm not such a fan of the dead specimens, but there are always loads of live ones to keep; there were quite a few very nice millipedes that really caught my eye, but alas, I haven't really got the space for any more than the one tank I already have (pink-legged millipedes). I rather fancy some nice orange ones one day though...

It was a pretty great day, and even managed to not spend a fortune on insects. And we didn't get soaked either! 

Spiders are cool

Spiders are cool. Like, really really cool. There's this massive stigma that they're absolutely terrifying, but, I've never really understood why. There's nothing more gross about a spider than there is a grasshopper, or a beetle, or even a butterfly- just because they're a different shape and like to come and chill in the corners of your bedroom in the winter, apparently that makes them incredibly scary.

The most impressive thing I think about spiders, are their webs. When I got lost on Godlingston Heath with the boyfriend a couple of weeks ago (no doubt I'll write about that eventually, there's lots to tell), we blundered across so many spiders, it was like something out of Aragog's lair, or Shelob's minions or something equally fantasy-bookish. We were a bit busy trying to work out which way through the forest of gorse bushes towards Agglestone Rock was least prickly, so we neglected to take pictures of the (hundreds) of spiders we came across (and their webs), but we found something even better once we got to Agglestone.

 Boyfriend for scale

This absolute beast of a web completely covered just one gorse bush next to Agglestone- strangely, every other gorse bush around was normal, with only a few webs here and there. It was this one specific bush, that didn't seem different or special from the rest, that was utterly covered. To the touch, it wasn't sticky, just very firm, with layers and layers of web.
Thankfully touching it didn't reward something like this (which I do admit, would have been a little bit frightening). It was amazing what such tiny creatures had managed to construct though, covering the whole bush so well!

I've seen webs cover gorse before, but not to quite the same amazing extent, and there's always been a few other webs around on nearby bushes, so this was quite a surprise! Especially when, poking the gorse itself, the webs were actually fairly good protection from the spines- something we had found out hurt all too well only half an hour before, when trying to get to Agglestone in the first place.
Now, with a little bit of googling and some good luck, I've found that these webs weren't actually woven by spiders, but something called gorse spider mite. Technically not spiders, they live in colonies and spin webs that act as shelters. This was a really massive colony! It's a biological pest control method that's used in a few countries where gorse is a weed, as they can cause massive damage to the host plants. This one looked fairly happy though, despite being absolutely swamped. Hopefully both will survive the winter season!