Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Pictures and reports of colonies on show around the world
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Deansie26
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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Deansie26 » Sat Jun 04, 2016 10:35 pm

That's fantastic! It should help to give us an in site to the gradients expeirenced I there!

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Acromyrmexbob
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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Acromyrmexbob » Sun Jun 05, 2016 8:57 pm

It would be great if you were able to post the data on here. Thats real time research which will prove very useful to us all I think. Nice work!

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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Marwellzoo » Tue Jun 21, 2016 10:28 am

Well the data logger has been in place inside the fungus garden for a while now. I last read it on 31st May, and will continue to do so every month. Unfortunately, I have been unable to upload the graph for you to see, although if anyone here does know of a way to do this, please let me know!
In a nutshell, we are finding the temperatures inside the fungus garden are remarkably stable, ranging from 22.5 degrees to 23 degrees, regardless of the outside temperature. As I have said before, the ants are housed in, what is essentially, a large greenhouse, where ambient temperatures can range from around 15 degrees on a cool night right up to almost 40 degrees on a hot afternoon. We have noticed that when we have a few warm days, the ants are building more vents leading down into the nest and gardens, but when temperatures are cooler, those vents are filled in. Given the huge fluctuation in ambient temperatures, the ants' ability to manage to nest and garden to maintain temperatures within half a degree is truly amazing.

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Deansie26
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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Deansie26 » Tue Jun 21, 2016 8:39 pm

Uploading this for Ali, the time scale is around 10 days with the high points being day time and the low points night.

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Great update by the way!

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Acromyrmexbob
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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Acromyrmexbob » Wed Jun 22, 2016 6:51 pm

That is fantastic!! Such great data. If you reckon the ants are managing this temperature via their ventillation etc then thats fantastic. Although it seems counter intuitive to think that the ants would allow more hot air from the greenhouse down into their nest to cool it, thats not the case. Hot air entering the nest, say air that is up over 30C, will pass over the wet peat surrounding the tunnels and fungus gardens. When it does this it will remove some moisture form the soil by evaporation which will decrease the temperature of the walls, in much the same way as sweating does in us. As a result the air that follows will be cooled and so on so hot air entering the nest will deliver cool air to the fungus, hence controlling the temperature. The ants are able to open and close tunnels to regulate this and the result is a 60 million year old air conditioning system. The secret here is lots of wet substrate. If there was little substrate or the substrate was dry the colony would cook because the ants cant work with it.
I would very much appreciate it if you were able to record data over a longer time period and publish the results here. This is very good stuff and could feed in to a better understanding of whats going on.

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Deansie26
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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Deansie26 » Wed Jun 22, 2016 7:11 pm

Great explanation, learn something new everyday!

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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Marwellzoo » Sat Jun 25, 2016 12:50 pm

Many thanks for the technical support!
I will leave the data logger inside the fungus garden from now on, but continue to read the data monthly. It would be great to get a year's worth of data to see how the temperature inside the garden fares during the winter.

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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Marwellzoo » Sun Jul 17, 2016 12:40 pm

Apologies for the lack of updates - I've been away and we're now entering silly season (school holidays)! I'll be reading the data logger again probably in a week or so (I'm away at an invertebrate conference for most of next week), so it will be interesting to see how that data is developing. We are noticing a lot of funnels being built by the ants at the moment and activity levels have soared. To the point where we are replenishing browse daily, if not twice daily. Normally we do this every couple of days and there's still some left when we replace it, so this is a significant increase in activity. It would be interesting to hear from others if they have experienced this sort of thing before, and does it coincide with any external factors?

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Acromyrmexbob
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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Acromyrmexbob » Tue Aug 09, 2016 8:32 pm

Interesting stuff. I think the increase in activity will be related to the external temperature. Carrying leaves in greater volume is normally either solely to feed the fungus or possibly to maintain a high humidity. In times of the year when temperature is very high there is a drying effect and one of the possible reactions to this is to increase the amount of wet vegetation entering the nest to keep humidity in the fungus chamber very high. Look forward to seeing your next temperature chart.

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Re: Marwell Zoo's new colony and setup pics

Post by Marwellzoo » Tue Aug 30, 2016 2:47 pm

Hi all, apologies for time since last update. We're well into the school holidays now, and as I'm sure you can imagine work is totally crazy right now. Roll on September!
We've had some unfortunate news regarding our data loggers - when I went to read the last month's data, the i-Button had malfunctioned and nothing could be retrieved. Whilst they are supposed to be able to withstand dirt and humidity, I feel that maybe it was just too damp. I've replaced this with a new i-Button, which I've put into a small baggie in the hope that that works.
The ants are continuing to cut at a very high rate. This colony seems to be cutting much more over the summer than our last colony did. I don't recall ever having to provide browse daily, let alone twice a day in the past. Luckily we have a few small areas around the zoo, which have been planted with the ants in mind, so there's plenty of browse around for us to cut.

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