This Week in Anting: Black Lighting

Had the black light on almost every night this week and saw lots of Acorn Ant activity. 

 

Hundreds of males to at least three species showed up at the black light between the hours of 9:00pm and 10:30pm. They probably fly all night but I don't need to stay out that late.

I've come to learn that identifying queens in this genus should never be done at a glance because there are some oddities I've never seen before.

So in the video this is what I was calling Temnothorax longispinosus. The problem is online images of queens of the species show them as totally black! None of this yellow spots on the gaster or bands of color. The legs are correct though. At a glance without any magnification this ant looked totally black to m.

 Now compare that to this queen. This is most likely Temnothorax ambiguus, and there were a lot of these running around in the video. They were very much different than the larger black species in the photo above. The trouble is though now that I have them in test tube setups these two look identical to one another! So I either have two species with very similar looking queens or some of the colonies to one species were just dehydrated (perhaps nesting somewhere with a small entrance hole requiring queens to slim down to leave the nest?)...

This is a Temnothorax curvispinosus queen. It is basically what all of my queens now look like besides a slight detail.

 The name "curvispinosus" refers to their curved spines. Those little thorns you see on rear part of the thorax on Temnothorax ants. 

  The name T. ambiguus refers to how difficult they are to tell apart from T. curvispinosus. The one main difference is that their spines are not curved at all.

Failed Attempts at Entomology

Over this past year I was hoping to enthrall readers with a how to in regard to black lighting for insects. My target audience though was going to be ants so I never got around to posting the info. Well after I'd made the thing I found that I wasn't getting any ants, where as in years past doing this in small scale I'd been able to get lots of ants, so clearly I must have been doing something wrong and that's why I never got around to posting this. Well it turns out there are two kinds of black lights and my larger setup used a weaker of the two despite being several feet longer. Hopefully I'll be able to fix this next year.

So here is my setup, illuminated with a spot light for photo reasons. Black lights don't illuminate well.

I experimented some with fabrics. All of these are white! But some don't illuminate well to a black light. However! Even the one that barely illuminated at all in the middle attracted insects. It has nothing to do weather or not the fabric glows, just so long as the light hits it. I was attracting the same general types of insects with everything.

As a side note I was completely disgusted to find my black light was illuminating "stains" on the sheets despite having never been used and coming from right out of the bag! I bought these at K-Mart and am hoping that's just a symptom of factory chemicals.

 

Insects showed up best on the whiter ones so I mostly used those. 

No idea which moth this is but I really like how smooth looking the wings are.

 Moth

Moth

White Moth

Crain Fly. Might be a Giant Crain Fly. Not sure what the criteria is. 

Midges.

Chinavia sp.

Soldier Beetle of some kind.

Ground nesting cockroach?

Lightning Bug in the spot light. Actually I think this mimicking a lightning bug.

Looks like a click bug.

Not sure what this is.

So those were the highlights of one year of doing this. I had it set up more than 6 times over the summer, always a day or two after it had just rained. Considering the high humidity I should have gotten more. And that's why this is a failure at Entomology. So at some point this year I'll hopefully buy a better light and have more to report back with.