Naturally since our colony was a myrmecocyctus colony, we right away assumed that our ants would prefer honey as their primary form of food. However, after several honey-related fatalities, we decided that streight honey probably wasn't the best way to go. We made several attempts at feeding them diluted honey (honey and water mixture) at different potencies, but the ants were either drowning in the food, for simply rejecting it. Then it came to our brilliant minds to try sugar water, this too failed. Although it was partially successful, the ants did eat it, but they were drowning in it as well.
We finally found a way to feed them a sugar based food by way of a fluke. In fact, the sugar based food we found to be the best was suar itself. We had, helf by accident and half as an experiment, put a small pile of white processed cane sugar (the kind you get for baking). The ants immediatly began to take the individual grains of sugar and carry them into the nest. After a few days of this we noticed the energy level of the colony as a whole had risen substancially.
After a while we decided that our ants were in need of protein. To remidy this, we put a live cockroach in the arena. They did attack the roach, but only ate a few selected parts of it. After many roaches we feared that they were not getting enough protein. Then we decided to try something else. We put an earwig in the arena and it ran into the tube and inside of the arena. It was immediatly tackled and killed by a small group of ants. After the ants had killed it, they tor it to pieces and consumed every last bit of it's body, except for the exoskelliton over the abdomin. We were excited to see this. We tried putting more earwigs in the arenas, but they wouldn't go into the nest on their own like their cousin did. So we started to "insert" them into the nest ourselves. This proved to be a very efficient way of feeding the colony, plus it made for a good 10 minutes of entertainment during each killing(see figures 18 and 19). |
