A Visit to Cape May, NJ

I drove down to Cape May yesterday. This is only an hour and a half from where I live in New Jersey. On one side of the dunes is a sprawling bird sanctuary, ponds, and platforms and docks which bird watchers can use to photograph the various sorts of birds that migrate through.

It's something of a birding hot spot in the country. I passed more than one tour in progress with lecturers discussing the different sorts of swans and herrings they were looking at. There's an informative sign that talks about the more exotic birds on the list, which the birds had shat on, along with my car.

I'm sure I got a picture of something exciting here, but birds really aren't my thing.

Just on the other side of the dunes there is a sandy beach with droves of seaside goldenrod planted for the Monarch migration. That's the reason I went down there but the day proved too cold and windy for butterflies to fly.

The day wasn't a total bust, as I found a few ants to photograph. This is the common Lasius neoniger, or Labor Day Ant, who's nuptial flights typically happen around Labor Day and in the afternoon no less, sometimes ruining BBQ's and the sport of golf across the US. They're otherwise a rather plane and common sort of ant that make small mounds wherever the soil tends to have some amount of sand to it and in full sun locations.

Also found, and slightly more interesting, was the population of Dorymyrmex bureni. This is a species at home to the state of Florida and South Carolina, but in recent years, it's worked its way up the coast and can now be found in New Jersey!

I believe it was first noticed by someone back in 2011 according to Bug Guide. Curiously the Citizen Science website School of Ants doesn't have a dot there yet, though I may have to fix that. Now that it's 2015 I can say the population there seems to be thriving as I found dozens of nests which outnumbered the indigenous Lasius neoniger. In past years though I've never known the beach line of Cape May to be abundant with ant colonies so this probably isn't an issue to worry about. Simply climate change allowing a species to push its range north.

The 4th Annual New Jersey Ant Together!

For the even I bought some specially labeled tubes which I intend to hand out at these events. The idea being to put queen ants in them to get what I refer to as the "money shot" and try to sell the event and get more interest. I can use this as the banner image for future Ant Togethers.... but dammit if I'm not the worst ant keeper in the whole god dam world. Later on we're in the parking lot and of all the test tubes to fall out of my bag.... I ran her ass over!    Somehow she survived and upon putting her in another tube she seems to have recovered well, a little twitchy though. I believe she is the dark form of Formica pallidefulva which is more common in this part of New Jersey. It's odd how just a little bit south this species becomes a brassy brown tone. We found colonies of both color forms around but the darker one was by far more common.


This one made it to the car!


Camponotus chromaiodes. (Same ant as seen above) This is typically the dominant Camponotus species in the forests here.


We also found a parasitic Formica wondering which I still need to ID. We actually didn't find any colonies of this at that location so it might be one of the more exclusive slave making kind such as F. pergandei. (Their colonies always require host Formica and never grow beyond what they can capture.)



Finding a colony of Pyramica was something of a highlight because it's not commonly found in suburban habitats.



Slightly less of a highlight but still interesting was this patch of bright white sand where colonies of Dorymyrmex were located.


This sand patch is also where a dried out sort of sphagnum moss was growing which we tried not to disturb. There were some large colonies of Monomorium there too.


Just up the trail we found a Pine Snake.


I liked our first location a lot because Wild Blueberries were coming into season. I'd never realized how much better Low Bush Blueberry tastes compared to High Bush because the plants grow in full shade the berries are at a more reasonable temperature. High Bush blueberry is more of a forest edge, full sun plant, thus the berries have a sharp taste to them unless chilled.



Sweet Fern was also growing all over the place along with droves of other types of ferns. This one in particular is adored by gardeners because the leaves have a pleasing smell to them.


I was calling this Wintergreen all day but now that I google it I'm not convinced. Anyone know what this is?


I also got to see Red Milkweed, Asclepias rubra, which is one of the rare species not yet in mainstream cultivation. It seems to be a bog plant requiring constantly damp muddy soil to grow.


Ants actually really like Milkweed so it's one of the plants I pay attention to. Formica especially seem to like stealing the nectar from Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca.


This is the dark form of Formica pallidefulva I believe.


At our second location, Turkey Swamp Park, I'm happy to say they seem to finally be doing something with that wide open field. Namely just not mowing patches of it here and there so the milkweed gets to grow.


It's here where we found yet another species of Formica all over the flowers. And I think this is the same as the next one below... this milkweed patch was right between the F. exsectoides super colonies, and a population of some other Formica who's majors rivaled the size of C. chromaiodes majors.




What's neat is they actually had foraging trenches dug out that occasionally dipped down underground. And we found multiple trails like this coming from the forest to some plants that were growing along a lake/stream where they were tending to droves of aphids like an assembly line.


We found quite a few more Formica exsectoides mounds this years. They were far more active, like 10 times more aggressive, and very pissed off that I inserted an endoscope into their mound. The video didn't really come out though... kind of like a horrifying colonoscopy video really.




We also found Termites nesting just beneath the bark of a tree, and just below that a Crematogaster colony had a brood chamber which we broke into unexpectidly thus starting a small war.


This is a Dog Bane Beetle. I like that their feet are blue.


Frogs!


Frogs for days!


High Five?


Last of all found this to be an ideal time to go looking for Indian Pipe. This is a rare wildflower that you will only ever see growing in the wild. It's a parasite that requires a beneficial fungi to be prescient in the soil to exchange nutrients from an established tree, typically a 60' tall Oak.


Oddly enough though we kept finding it trying to grow beneath logs. Not just on one occasion but on several! Suggesting that the seeds somehow find their way under dead wood structures, or maybe this is where the beneficial fungus most often occurs?


Basically because it's a parasitic plant, it doesn't produce any chlorophyll, thus it's not green but rather a frail white.


After flowering, the plant almost sorts of melts, and shrivels up into twig-like stems.


Fallen leaves in a spot that floods on occasion, apparently dyed a silver tone from the algae or something growing on them.

Arizona: Dorymyrmex Study

Dorymyrmex, despite being a common genus, remains something of a mystery in North America. The trouble is that no one's really studied them well enough to get the genus right. Eastern species are fairly well known, but out west.... the genus is in pure chaos. Basically if it's black it keys out to Dorymyrmex insanus, and studies that look into the matter simply describe new species with a sentence or two.

The station we stayed at had loads of colonies of them on the property. We spent a day flagging each of them, and then putting sets of workers together to see if they got along or not.

Workers from the same colony got along, those from different one almost murdered on another on sight.

Though time consuming, it's fun work.

We found that the colonies had changed boundaries from the previous year, as well one of them had become massive in size (not in photo). Pictured above is a typical nest comprised of maybe 6 to 12 holes. The large colony crossed one of the trails here and was comprised of 26 holes.

We dug up one nest and found the general structure of one of their nests is simply one narrow tunnel leading down at a slight angle, leading through several galleries.

For time reasons we didn't get down below 3'. And it likely extends much deeper than that. Most of the ant nests in the area seem to go down 12' or so. How many queens they have, or if the ant hills are connected somehow underground are unknown. It's likely that these nests are not connected and there might be only one queen per hole, but also likely that in the winter the nests combine down into fewer holes. Perhaps queen number and or age help determine the number of satellite holes. 

That was the extent of our study. Future courses may continue the work.