Recently while attempting (unsuccessfully) to photograph several water striders in a pond, I came across several ants that appeared to be swimming in the water.  Well, it didn’t look exactly like they were swimming as they certainly had a tough time of it – but likewise they did not appear to be drowning.  So can ants swm?

After noticing this phenomenon, I was rather curious whether ants can swim and whether they regularly do so.  For the most part, they don’t.  However, recently scientist have found a species that can actually swim and does so in the mangrove forests of northern Australia.

While ants can’t actually swim, most of them do float.  For this reason, it is rather difficult to drown an ant.  My six year old can attest to this as he has already tried to do this numerous times with the carpenter ants that used to inhabit our backyard.

The two ants that I took the time to photograph floundered quite a bit in the water.  They moved their legs rapidly but didn’t really seem to make any progress.  Nevertheless, they did not appear to be in any danger of drowning.  I am not exactly sure how they wound up in the water in the first place, but my suspicion is they were on a leaf or thin branch on a tree above that then fell in the water – or perhaps they blew off of one of the tall blades of grass near the water.

The first ant I photographed eventually reached land and climbed up and went on its way.  The second ant was still floundering in the water when I left.  I was a bit curious whether one of the nearby water striders would attack it, but they scattered quickly from the area when I approached.  Water striders are extremely difficult to photograph up close because they can obviously sense tiny vibrations.  They also seem to have rather good eyesight and to date I have only been able to photograph them using longer lenses.

Still, I did not see them attack either of the ants.  It is difficult to say whether they were scared of me or felt an ant would have been too difficult of a prey, or more likely I didn’t spent enough time waiting.

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From some research on the Internet, I believe this is Tetramorium caespitum, or the standard pavement ant.  They are famous for getting in fights with other colonies, though I do not believe that is what is occurring here.

They are distinguishable from the two spines on its back, which you can see from this shot.  Of course, they are so tiny in real life that you need a good magnifying glass to be able to see them well.

  I took a number of shots of the colony, though I didn’t have a lot of time to stick around there.  It was right next to my work and I felt a bit funny laying on the ground getting these photos while my coworkers were walking by!

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First, I am not a myrmecologist and my knowledge of ants and carpenter ants comes from reading several books and observing them in my backyard.  Therefore, some of the information below may be incorrect.  If you know some of it to be false, please let me know and I will gladly correct it.

To be honest, I’m not sure if all of them were queens, all were males, or if there was a mix, but I suspect the latter.  Their clearly were smaller winged ants and larger ones.  I watched and photographed the phenomenon for a good hour.  While in my opinion none of the shots are great on their own, altogether the tell a very interesting story.

In the picture above, you can see a number of the winged ants (can’t say for sure whether they are queens or males) at the base of the landscaping timbers preparing to leave.  Most of them (or in the case of the males – all of them) will die within the next several days.  Of the queens, only a couple will likely make it – if that.

Here are some more shots of the crowd waiting to take their chances.

One interesting thing that I noticed in the shots, is that some of them appear to be eating something just before leaving.  I am not sure of this, but it certainly does appear to be the case.  In this shot, it looks like the ant is eating something.

 In the following shot, it looks like it is finishing.  At least, whatever it has there is less of it.

Finally, in this shot it looks like it has finished.

  I’m not entirely sure what the case is here.  Perhaps they are eating a meal provided by the nest before their long journey?

Of course, all of these vital elements of the nests future are not left unguarded.  Among the new kings and queens are a number of soldier ants.

  The queens would line up on the landscaping timbers, and then make their final jump from their nest.  Some of them succeeded in taking off and flying a good distance (sometimes into my face), while the wings of others were clearly not ready yet.  A number of them landed on a plant in front of the nest.  They would take flying leaps and land on one of the leaves, then climb on to the leaf, travel to the very end, and take another leap from the top.

You can tell that the effort was exhausting for them, as many of them were still weak.

After climbing to on top of the leaf, they next would make their way to the very end.

Once at the end of the leaf, each of them would open its wings and make its leap of faith.  Some of them would fall to the ground or a different leaf below, while others would finally succeed at flying.

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I have some suspicions about what was going on, but the truth is I don’t really know.  There were several of these “bumps” on the bush and the ants were traveling from one to the other.  There were perhaps five ants in total that I saw.

You can see in the picture that some fluid appears to be coming out of the mound.  My suspicion is that the ants are lapping this up and it is some sort of sugary compound that the ants like.  I have read about situations where a plant entices ants to live on it for the sake of self defense.  The plant provides a place to live and nourishment for hte ants, and in exchange the ants chase away insects that feed on the plant.

I’m not sure if that is what is happening in this case, but that is my best guess.

My second guess is that these “bumps” are not actually part of the plant. They don’t exactly look like they are attached to the plant and perhaps they are some insect themselves.  I have read about ants tending to aphids – kind of like how humans tend to cows.  However, as far as I know aphids give birth to smaller versions of themselves.  The photo above certainly does not look like an aphid, but as far as I know these are not limited to aphids alone.

I spent some time trying to identify this ant, but I have to say that I truly have no idea.  I have a copy of Ants of North America, but the only thing it told me was this is from the subfamily Formica, which didn’t help me too much.

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At first I was rather excited because as I prodded it to move to the leaf I smelled something curious.  Had the stink bug actually fired at me?  After all, it is well known that stink bugs defend themselves through a foul smelling mixture that they spray at potential attackers.  I then heard my neighbor cussing that something he had opened really stunk, which culled the excitement.  A closer sniff of the bug revealed that it was not the stink bug itself.  Perhaps it did spray, but I couldn’t smell it.

I then moved the stink bug to a primrose that I felt was more photogenic.

It didn’t seem enthralled to be there and soon took off.

I let it go, knowing that it certainly will not be the last stink bug I photograph this year.  I always enjoy photographing them due to their bright green color and interesting eyes.  The next time though I think I’ll try finding a leaf that matches the color as close as possible and try some photographs on it.  I’m not sure the strong colors of the flower really helped the shot in this case.

Another interesting episode came with an ant that I found crawling in one of our recycle bins.  It took off when I tried to photograph it and crawled into the bin.  I watched it for a bit until it came to the very edge of the recycle bin and we stared at each other for about a minute.

I’m not sure of the species.  It did not appear to be a carpenter ant, but I didn’t get a good enough shot of the entire body to be able to identify it.

Finally, I did not have too much luck with the flies that day – who were a bit skittish, but I did manage to get one fly.  Interestingly it was wingless – though I’m not sure why.

Why this particular fly did not have wings will have to go in my mystery bin.

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I took all of these about two months ago shortly before shooting a house for Nelya.  She didn’t mind too much that I showed up quite dirty from my previous shoot.

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I happen to find carpenter ants quite interesting and one species of them – Camponotus Modoc, is very common around here.  Therefore, when I saw Carpenter Ants Of The United States And Canada on sale at a used book store, I decided to pick up a copy and learn more about them.

It turns out what was happening was a new generation of queens was getting ready for flight.  The scene above occurred one day when I propped up a log in my backyard where I know there is a nest.

In terms of what I hoped to get out of the book, I hoped to better understand carpenter ants.  I am neither a myrmecologist nor an exterminator.  I just want to understand them better in order to get better pictures.  In that respect, the book succeeded.

However, I do feel that the book cannot decide who its primary audience is.  It includes chapters that go into depth on their anatomy as well as a chapter on extermination practices.  Therefore it is half aimed at myrmecologists and half aimed at exterminators.  However, the chapters meant for each professional are likely not interesting to the other.  I suspect this was to get the best possible sales from the book, as I doubt there exists a huge audience for this material.  The authors are scientists themselves, but likely recognize that exterminators are a larger market.

Still, there really isn’t anything out there that covers carpenter ants better.  Particularly interesting is the fact that the authors spent a great deal of time in Washington State and covered our most common species – Camponotus Modoc – extensively.  Unlike the majority of insect books that focus on the East coast, in this book most of the material was relevant to my area.

For me, the value in this book is the knowledge that I can let the carpenter ants live in my backyard for photography purposes, and with monitoring and a few precautions I can sharply minimize the chances that they will damage my house.  They are certainly fascinating subjects.  Someday I hope to start a nest indoors (though likely with a different species than carpenter ants) for photography purposes, though I don’t dare yet approach my wife with the idea.

Of course this book could have been written more mainstream, but given the subject it is the best source of information out there.  Therefore, if you are interested in carpenter ants I recommend this book.

BTW, if you are interested in myrmecology and ants in general, I highly recommend you visit Myrmecos’ web site.

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I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to let carpenter ant colonies thrive in our backyard, but so far they seem content to live in the rotting landscaping timbers.  As I understand it takes a long time for them to do any structural damage to a house and I have not seen them near the house anyway.  I decided to play my first ant “experiment” and took a carpenter ant from one part of the yard and placed it by carpenter ants in another part.  I expected to see the ants not get along at all but for the most part they didn’t fight at all.  The ant I moved did hide in a hole and peep out every once in awhile, but other ants from the native colony were in the same hole.  Therefore my hypothesis is that the colony is larger than I thought and that all of the ants actually belong to the same colony.

While photographing the ant, I made the mistake of not correcting the aperture from some earlier shots I took of the kids.  The result was I wound up with a much lower aperture than I ordinarily would have used.  The effect though, is interesting and I’ll show some shots after the jump.

This shot wasn’t photoshopped at all (didn’t have the time) but I kind of like the effect of the narrow DOF – showing just the jaws and head of the ant.  Here’s another shot.

The jaws open certainly appear to be a defensive posture, but as I said it was not attacked nor did it attack any of the other ants.  Here are some shots I took of it after I corrected the aperture.

Normally I take my macro shots at f/11.  At f/16, there is too much quality loss due to diffraction issues.  At 5x sometimes I have to move the aperture down to f/9 due to diffraction issues but for most shots I find that f/11 is a decent balance between maximizing DOF and minimizing diffraction loss.  In the above shot DOF is actually rather good for a macro – though I think I was only at around 2x.

Later in the day we caught some of the ants and put them in my kids’ space age ant farm.  The kids are really getting a kick out of it right now and just tonight they insisted that they join us for dinner.  What’s interesting as well is Nelya has taken a big interest in the ants – watching them dig tunnels and change their environment.  I mentioned that ants like sugar so she placed a bit of it in their enclosure – though she gave them so much I fear they will overdose! 

Still, getting back to the ‘mistake’, I think I like the narrow DOF pictures better than the shot with more DOF.  What do you think?

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Literally a few meters away from the path, I noticed a strange sign.  There was no path down to the side, but not much in terms of brush preventing one from taking a look, so I decided to see what it said.  What I found, sitting on the Microsoft campus in a spot where even we weren’t familiar with, was a new world that I am just beginning to explore.

The sign mentioned that about one hundred years ago, someone built a mill on the very spot I was standing.  The mill was later moved and little remains on the site to prove that it was there, save several small ponds.  These small ponds are teeming with life, and I knew that I would be spending a great number of lunch hours investigating this area.  I quickly went back to my office and e-mailed the photography alias at work.  The next day we had a mini event there, without perhaps eight of us photographing.  I suspect that some of them may have been disappointed – nothing is in bloom yet and from first looks the area seems rather lifeless and dull.  Of course, this was far from the case.

I’m not sure what the thing pictured above is.  Given the number of pincers on the front I certainly wouldn’t want to come across it as prey.  The following is a wider shot of it.

I found a number of cute snails there.  This one I found just before leaving.

Here’s another one of the same species burrowed into a log.  I’m not sure exactly how it wound up in this position.

I also found a very interesting ant in a log.  Unfortunately, among the number of shots I took of it none of them came out as I had hoped.  I am still trying to look up what species it is, but I suspect that I will need to purchase a better book on ants.  Off hand, my guess is it is some kind of carpenter ant – based solely on the fact that I found it in a log.  Interestingly enough, I did not find any similar ones in the vicinity.

Another member of our group found a wasp sitting on a log.  The wasp was good sized, but appeared to be either cold, sick, or dying.  It wasn’t very active, though still alive.  I didn’t take too many shots of it as there were a number of us interested in getting pictures of it.  Normally I fear wasps, but I kind of felt sorry for this one.

It obviously needs some Photoshopping, which I may do later.  The final interesting critter of the day was what I believe to be a harvestman.

All in all I believe the shoot was successful.  During subsequent lunches I expect to come back here and see what else I can find.  As it is very difficult to get the opportunity to shoot at places other than my backyard, I couldn’t have been more excited to find such an interesting location so close to work.

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