Mating Flight: Ants
Okay, technically, the flight portion hasn’t actually started. Tiogshi Laj went back to the ant colony he photographed last week and took another look. This time he found about a dozen of these larger, winged ants hanging around. Those are either new queens or male drones. I’m guessing queens because they are almost twice the size of the workers, and males tend to be fairly close to normal size. Either way, this is a mating flight in its first stages!
The thing that’s really crazy, however, is that I’m pretty sure those are Formica ants of some kind, but Formica ants don’t start mating flights until next June! I could believe it if this were in a lower latitude perhaps, but Tiogshi is in Canada! It is entirely possible that the ant mating flight schedule¹ I consulted was inaccurate or incomplete. It is even more possible that I have simply misidentified these ants. But still, it’s interesting to note.
Thanks, Tiogshi!
¹ Yes, such things exist. This implies that there also exist people who spend their time creating them.
P.S. This mating flight chart from Germany shows a couple of Formica species that fly in mid-April. Ants species aren’t quite as cosmopolitan as humans, but if they can fly in April in that climate, perhaps they can fly now here.
Slowly getting the site back onto an even keel. It's nice to get back into the old posting rhythm.
tceisele said,
April 22, 2008 @ 7:17 am
Do you suppose it’s possible that the winged ant isn’t even the same species as the non-winged ants? I mean, she isn’t the same color as the workers, her head has a distinctly different shape, and her thorax looks *completely* different (she has a huge, hump-backed thorax while the workers all have narrow, spindly thoraxes, although that might be just because she has flight muscles that the workers don’t need).
I’ve heard of ants where the young queens fly out from their parent nests, find a nest of some other ant species, and fake the chemical cues so that they can sneak inside. Then they lay their own eggs, get their brood taken care of by the ants that are already there, and kind of take over the colony from within. Maybe this is one of them?
JFargo said,
April 22, 2008 @ 8:28 am
I don’t know nothin’ about all that fancy talk tceisele is jivin’ up there, but I do know that that picture skeeves me out like nobody’s business. No idea why. Ants don’t freak me out none.
(And no, I don’t know why I wrote that as I did. It just felt right.)
JVidal-Riggs said,
April 22, 2008 @ 9:32 am
Hmmm… I can’t agree with JFargo right there… I like the picture. Can you make it into a wallpaper?
Tiogshi Laj said,
April 22, 2008 @ 9:37 am
You know, if these winged ants are queens from a slaver species, I can vividly imagine what tceisele said being spot-on. And while the picture itself I’m fine with, that thought skeeves me out a bit, too… I like the idea of ants’ nests going to traditional war, not subverting eachother’s cultures from within using subterfuge and social camoflauge.
David Brady said,
April 22, 2008 @ 12:38 pm
JVidal-Riggs: Here’s one at 1920×1200. Holler if you need a different rez or aspect ratio. http://www.insectpod.com/images/20080422_tiogshi_laj_ants_1920×1200.jpg
Kazriko said,
April 23, 2008 @ 2:39 am
I recently saw a bunch of these winged ants dead in my office up against a window. Not sure how they got in though.
The last time before this though was when they were all over my yard. They were providing a tasty meal for a toad. It was kind of amusing watching the toad hop in to gobble a winged ant, then retreat before the regular ants started swarming him.
I’m a bit morbid today.