Even in Kyoto

Well, I'm back in Tempe for now. Best to not overstay my welcome with family in Tucson, plus even more than that, I needed to check on the leafcutter ant queens. Overall, they are doing well. The first eggs are just starting to hatch into microlarvae, and the only colony I've lost so far is one that I repeatedly tried to give a fresh fungus garden. It was a pair of queens where I think the queens may have contracted infections very early on, so they just never bothered to try starting a nest. They laid some eggs, but they never gathered their eggs into a cluster, unlike every other nest.

So overall, this is a pretty high success rate with this group of queens, so far.

Since I'm now car-free in Tempe until the mechanic maybe eventually gets back to me, it's harder for me to get up to Tempe Town Lake to go rowing. It's 9 miles to get there, which a mapping tool estimates would take me about 45 minutes. Sounds about right. That by itself doesn't sound so bad, except this team gathers at 4:45 am, so I'd be pushing my 4 am wake-up limit to try and get there on time. On top of that I would need to budget water for biking, on top of the water budget for rowing itself. And I'd be out in the heat for 45 more minutes after practice wraps up, in addition to the 45 minutes before practice. Know your limits, as they say.

So I think I'm just going to try and go for a medium-distance bike ride every other morning. From here, a loop up to Tempe and up around Papago Park is probably just about the right length.

Regarding the mechanic, I waited yesterday until late in the afternoon to call and see what's up since they hadn't called me yet, and they basically just replied that they're backed up and will call once my car has moved up in the queue. Meanwhile, a friend suggested obtaining a device that would allow me to interpret "check engine" error codes directly, which seems like a good investment for the long term, since not all "check engine" circumstances are equivalent. In this case, from some cursory reading, it sounds like the engine knock sensor is generally a good thing to have, but it's not catastrophic to drive around with a faulty one. But on the other claw, they might yet uncover other pack rat surprises. So we'll see.

Things will only get really problematic if this spills over into next week, when I've been planning to drive up to Payson for a social insect conference. The situation can be finagled without a car, but it would be added hassle because I'd originally put myself on a list to offer rides to other conferencegoers.

In the meantime, there are old data analysis scripts to dust off, organize, and rerun. Not exactly entertaining to read about.

And somewhere in the midst of it all, I really need to give Princess TinyBike a thorough bath.

Yesterday I wound up going in to campus with JH, so I could pick up some extra leafcutter fungus from a larger colony there, and also a dissecting microscope. While there, I spent a couple minutes catching up with a grad school friend who was part of a "Write That Paper" study group with me back in the day (RO). So it was fun to complain to him about being in the midst of trying to finish up a bunch of papers, talking about how whatever current manuscript I'm agonizing over gets referred to as the Manuscript of Doom.

Regarding the leafcutter fungus: by yesterday afternoon/evening, approximately a quarter of the nests had lost their fungus gardens. I need to pore over the data I've been collecting to come up with some refined hypotheses about why that happened, but that number seems high, compared to other years. That said, I can only wish I managed to film the queens' reactions after I gave them a tiny morsel of replacement fungus. They get very noticeably excited when they discover their good fortune. They are then very careful to fastidiously clean off their antennae and mandibles before they pick up the new fungus gift and then relocate it to wherever they have decided to cluster the eggs they've been laying.

My goal was to give them enough fungus to restart their garden, but not so much that they could get away with avoiding the need to forage.

Maybe I'll have more time/success filming the queens later today. I've generally been doing a major check at some point in the afternoon, but otherwise leaving them undisturbed.

The dissecting microscope was both helpful and a distraction. The one that I'm borrowing has a pretty good camera mount, so I found and downloaded the software and tried taking a few pictures and short videos. The trouble is, I should have also borrowed a fiber-optic light to go with the scope - I hadn't realized that the only built-in light on the scope was a sub-stage light.

And in future years, I should try to remember to bring along the field microscope that I found in my lab.

Anyway, I rigged up something temporary with a flashlight, which at least allowed me to get images like this one:



It's tricky to get good photos or video of moving animals with this kind of rig. I think at some point when I have slightly more bandwidth, I should read and learn more about different types of macro lens options. From what I understand, a wide-angle lens might wind up being really useful.

Anyway. Ant-tending yesterday took about two hours, meaning that I didn't have as much time to work on manuscript-writing. But I need to keep making forward progress, so that's today's goal.

I often wind up engaging in internet procrastination loops, though. So for today, I'm keeping a window-swap tab open in the hopes that it gives me a chance to rest my eyes and brain, and then get back to writing again.

Things probably won't actually go that way in practice, but it's a nice idea, at least.

Last week, I asked S if he would be so kind as to mail me my traditional ant-collecting hat, which I'd forgotten in the flurry of packing. Well, that plus a couple other things, to really justify the effort.

The hat arrived yesterday, so I jokingly took a photo and posted that now I was finally ready for "flying ant day," as a recent New York Times article put it (I guess that people in the UK observe this sacred holiday?).



Well, then last night, the weather radar and the automated rainfall gauges started to strongly hint that there might be rain falling in just the right place. I tried to recheck the gauges this morning when I got up at 3:50 am, but the page wouldn't load (I hear there were maybe some tech outages?).

"Well heck," I said to myself, "If it turns out that this is a good time to go and I just roll over and go back to sleep, I'm going to be really mad. If I show up and I'm too early, at least I'll know." So, 4:10 am and I was on the road to Tucson.

There was a surprising amount of traffic on the road at that time of morning, more than I recall seeing on previous years.

When I exited the Interstate and started to traverse across northern Tucson, I wasn't very optimistic. I had the windows rolled down and could tell the air was dry.

But lo, as soon as I got to my usual spots, a swarm!





Most of my photos are on the DSLR camera; after collecting the queens, I basically hightailed back to Tempe to get the queens painted and then set up in nests.

Nest setup in progress:


I decided to set up the queens either in pairs, or in groups of 6. I gave each queen a colored paint mark so I can tell who's who in each nest. I will monitor the division of labor and a number of other things as these colonies start to grow.

Most of that work will begin in earnest tomorrow. For right now, I am SO ready for a nap.

When I gave a public talk earlier this fall on ants, I wound up ordering a copy of Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants of New York City, and also made a cheatsheet for myself with photos and brief descriptions of the 15 most common ant species. You know, so I could sound like I know a thing or two about ants. Just in case.

About a week ago, while I was stretching in the living room, I glanced up at one of our bookshelves and discovered that I must have ordered a copy of Dr. Eleanor's Book some time ago in the past, shelved it, and then completely forgot about it.

So at least now I have a copy for work, and a copy for home?

In any case. Yesterday, when a student worker and I went into the Ant-Antechamber (entry room outside the ant/cricket room), we encountered a small unexpected mess on the floor. Some pipe in the ceiling had developed a leak, and half a ceiling tile fell:



When I went to clean up the mess, I discovered that there were ants among the ceiling tile fragments!

Remnants of the mess:


You have to look closely, but there are some tiny black ants in here, milling about:



Based on my handy cheatsheet and a simple test (crush one and smell for a blue cheese aroma), these are Odorous House Ants, aka Tapinoma sessile. In the past, they have been very successful at cleaning up any crumbs that I've spilled in my office. I think we also once got to witness a nest migration in between potted plants in an atrium room in the building. I think in this case, they were probably attracted to the moisture from the leaky pipe.

The ceiling above the Anty-chamber is not a great place for them to hang out, however, so our facilities folks are going to have to set up some bait traps to manage the ceiling population. Thankfully, our facilities folks are very understanding about the fact that we absolutely cannot have any pesticides applied anywhere in this building, because the risks are too great for the organisms we all study. And really, for the most part, the Tapinoma tend to keep to themselves. Unlike the mice, those assholes.

This is the most amusing Building Issue I've experienced here, so far. If all Building Issues were like this one, I would be a happy person.

We have a regional science organization here that puts on this "Science on Tap" talk series where they get a scientist to give a public talk about their research at a local bar.

Long story short, because friends and acquaintances so frequently have questions about ants, I've volunteered to give a talk next Wednesday evening as a part of the series. While I will include some information about my research, I thought it sounded more fun to to just title my talk: "Ants: What's Their Deal?"

This leads me to another one of these important questions to ask of you: if you could ask me any question about ants during my talk, what would you want to know more about?

...I mean, by default, I'll just tell stories about ants with all kinds of exotic and fascinating life-history strategies.

But maybe you have a different question I should attempt to answer?

A package showed up in the mail today:







A friend from my youth, E, makes these and sells them on Etsy. She got her start ages ago, making chicken hats, inspired by a desire to give her mom a soft and comfortable and fun hat to wear when her mom was going through chemotherapy.

A mutual friend of ours gave me one of E's chicken hats ages ago, most recently seen in this photo from Halloween:


E had recently asked for suggestions for new animals to try, and I am so glad she took me up on my suggestion for ants! The best part is that not only did she design and make this hat, she's selling both red ants and black ants, and has both "realistic" ants and cartoon ants.

I have big plans for this hat.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/lilecreations

After almost all of our seed-harvester queens died, I made plans to go back to California. Picked up the rental car yesterday morning, picked up the students, and drove straight back to Pine Valley. Our first 30 minutes of searching were disheartening, but then, miracle of miracles, we found a heap more queens! The students were especially thrilled.

We stayed overnight at a motel in Wynola, with pizza (and for me, good beer) for dinner at a fancy pizza place. In the morning we ventured back over to Lake Henshaw and got another decent haul of queens from there, too.

Shortly afternoon, we set sail back to Arizona (metaphorically speaking; this time the rental car was some kind of Kia - definitely my least favorite of all the cars I've driven recently).

Now we are back and I am exhausted. Tomorrow we'll be back to respirometry in the lab again.

Saturday morning I checked the Pima County rain gauges: enough rain to trigger leafcutter ant mating swarms. I went down to the lake for rowing practice, but screwed up the time and was 30 minutes late, so no rowing after all. Instead I toodled around the lake for a bit and through chance bumped into an old randonneur who provided support on the brevet where our friend RG flatted 7 times on his Brompton before throwing in the towel.

Then, campus. I finished prepping the leafcutter nest dishes that I'd brought with me to Arizona and attended to the seed-harvester ant queens. Then back to the house by way of the auto repair shop, where I picked up the Honda with its new radiator. When I got to the house, I checked the oil and noted the oil level was still low, so I walked back over to the closest gas station and picked up a couple more quarts of oil. Put those in, packed a couple things up, then told my smart-o-phone to point me to Tucson whilst avoiding the highways, and got on the road.

I made it about 5 miles when the engine coughed hard and blew a bunch of smoke. I somehow got myself into a left-turn lane at Broadway and McClintock, waved people around me, and sat through a light cycle with the engine off. When the arrow turned green again, I managed to limp the car into a shaded parking spot at a Burger King and then called my uncle.

While I waited for the tow truck, I booked a rental car from the airport rental place (nothing else open due to the holiday weekend) and put my bike back together (borrowing a bike from a friend). Instead of just taking the light rail over, I decided to bike there, not realizing that the airport rental car place is a whole separate facility several miles further down the road from the airport.

Regardless - made it there, stuffed the bike into the rental car, and got on the road to Tucson. I made it there by 6:30, which was enough time to drive the usual roads and check to see whether there was evidence of queens having already flown. Seeing none, I drove back to my aunt's house, where she spoiled me with a lavish and delicious dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I can't even begin to describe how wonderful it was to get to catch up with her and my cousin D. They have been so good to me over the years, and it was also a real treat for them to get to catch up because they haven't been able to go much of anywhere. My cousin D is on immune-suppressing drugs and still has to be extremely careful about It.

If the queens had already flown, I would have needed to go back out at night to try and pick them out of their new nests. Instead, since they didn't seem to have flown, I got to go to sleep, setting the alarm for 5 am. I woke up at 4:59 with a start because the first light of dawn penetrated my brain and made me think there was a chance I'd overslept. I made coffee and got on the road by 5:20 am. As I drove towards the intersection of Sunrise and Skyline roads, I started to see the little forms of ant bodies flying through the air: an auspicious sign.

When I reached one of our sweet spots along Sunrise, I knew I was right: perfect timing to catch a big swarm.





Field notes for myself: Swarm began shortly before 5:30 am, so shortly after sunrise. It continued to grow until around 6 - 6:15 am, with a fairly even sex ratio. Queens and males would fall to the ground to mate, and then they would fly up again into the swarm. I was thinking I'd wait until queens started to tear their wings off, but as time went on, the swarm became more and more male-biased, until the ants on the ground largely consisted of big balls of males mobbing a small number of queens. Therefore I conclude that after they've mated, the majority of queens fly away from the swarm to nearby locations to search for places to start new nests. Walking around the immediate vicinity of the swarm location, I did not encounter any queens starting to dig, confirming my sense that the swarm location is not surrounded by ideal leafcutter habitat.

As the swarm wound down, I drove over to the corner of Sunrise and Swan, stopping in at a convenience store to use the restroom and get some chocolate milk. When I drove to Swan the night before, I discovered that the road has changed a ton in the last couple of years, with a lot of new developments having gone in. That has also meant that places where I've searched in the past aren't so fruitful anymore. Regardless, I walked up a stretch of road to see what I could find. As I returned down the road back towards the car, I hit a second jackpot: a patch of desert landscape that was perfect nest-starting ground. So in addition to collecting a number of queens out of the mating swarm, I was also able to collect 60 queens as they started digging new nests (means they are fully mated).

Then: back to my aunt's house for breakfast/brunch and more time catching up (so amazing to get to catch up with family!!), back on the road to Phoenix, to the lab to set up what nests I could, to the house to pick up the students, to the airport to drop off the rental car just in time, and then RG picked us up for some pool time at the Graduate and a Fourth of July fish BBQ feast at their house.

I'm not sure the feast or crowd were quite the cup of tea for the students for a Fourth of July experience, but that is what it is.

Now back to the lab.

Sunday morning we brought the ants in to the lab and got underway with data entry and general organization. JF came in to help out with that, and then at around 11, JH showed up to help out with getting things set up to measure ant queen metabolic rates.

I am impressed with how quickly we got everything set up. It only took us 3 hours.



Now we have around 100 queens to measure, one by one. Each queen takes somewhere between 15 and 40 minutes to finish - ideally closer to 15. I am not going to do the math on how long that will take.

As soon as I got the students trained up on how to run the respirometry trials, two of us popped over to the grocery store, then up to the house to cook some dinner, then back to the lab to feed everyone.

At 8:30 pm last night, the computer we are using to collect data froze on us, so we burned an hour or so getting it working again. Frustrating, but there isn't much we can do about that.

We drove home at 10 pm, then I put the bike in the back of the rental car and drove the car back to the rental place. The rental place isn't open on Sundays, so the lot was packed full of returned cars - so full that there was only a single spot left where one more car would fit. Whew.

It felt really, really good to ride the bike home. My right leg/foot are fatigued and sore from the drive back from California. Lots of time on the back highway meant that my foot was on the accelerator/brake for hours on Saturday.

When I left Arizona in 2018, I carried along with me a small batch of Palo Brea seeds thinking and hoping that I'd eventually be able to grow some small plants here. (I should note that Palo Brea are fast-growing TREES, so I'd have to cull them after a point or turn them into bonsai). The seeds are still sitting in a small Mason jar here on my desk, at work. I'm not entirely certain of their germination requirements; I believe that, in the wild, they typically germinate during the hot summer monsoon months.

The trouble is, I have run out of dried Palo Brea leaves to feed the two leafcutter colonies here. So, what to do?

Some of the projects from Scientific Writing this past fall gave me an idea. This species seems to enjoy harvesting leaves from leguminous plants. So, maybe I should try growing a leguminous plant or two, and feed the shoots to the ants.

I used my lab's fancy drill press to drill more holes in the bottom of more yogurt tubs, and took advantage of my lab's nice, deep windowsill, plus a set of my favorite green seed trays that I discovered in the supplies I inherited with my lab space, to begin my ExPEAriment, as I am calling it:

Take that, Winter!


Initial popularity test:


Not the greatest macro photo setup, but hopefully if you squint you can see that the ants are, indeed, adding green leaf chunks to the fungus garden:



A couple hours later, and the evidence is clear: they like it!



The pea plants continue to grow:


So I gave them a bunch more today.

A bonANTza, as my PhD advisor would say!







They like to get internal storage depots going sometimes before adding stuff into the fungus garden:



It's fun to watch them at work.

There's actually even more backstory to this. Way back during my PhD I tried to grow and feed wheatgrass to some leafcutter ant colonies, based on the suggestion of one of my PhD advisors who primarily works with grasshoppers. But I could never seem to get the logistics right for the wheatgrass. Instead of a lush carpet of wheatgrass I only ever managed to grow a few spindly blades, and even when I tried giving colonies a handful of wheatgrass hacked from a storebought container, it just didn't seem like I got much plant material. I think that wheatgrass might just be too watery and insubstantial for the ants.

So the pea shoots are looking MUCH more promising, which is even more satisfying in the context of those wheatgrass failures from so long ago.