Hello ,

The biggest challenge of all to keep ants or other omnivorous insects is to keep their diet varied enough to ensure that they get all the nutrients they require. Feeding ants only sugar water or honey simply won't be sufficient in the long run, as they require the proteins and amino acids that are present in other food items to survive.

I keep two different species of cockroach, two species of beetle larvae and collect a large variety of insects to feed all the ants every day. This does keep them healthy, but recently I came to the conclusion that healthy might not be enough.

The Troglodyte Trapjaw Ants (Odontomachus troglodytes) has been one of the most challenging species to successfully rear through the founding stages. I have tried three years already, and only on the third year succeeded in raising not only one, but 4 colonies successfully. The second year I managed to keep a queen alive for over 10 months, but she killed her pupae the day it should've emerged and died herself not long after.

Keeping the queen healthy and well-fed was possible, but something was a miss. Her diet was very varied, yet she still didn't survive her initial founding stages.

While reading up on Trapjaws, I read that the Troglodyte Trapjaws are often encountered in old termite mounds and often in old logs. As I continued my literature research into the Troglodyte Trapjaws, I read that a large portion of the Southern Trapjaw Ant's (Odontomachus assiniensis) diet consists out of termites. I decided to try and get a queen trough founding again, but this time I was going to feed the queen 80% or more termites to see if it makes any difference.

The result was the successful rearing of Troglodyte Trapjaw Ant colonies from a single founding queen. To my surprise, the first workers arrived in only 8 weeks after the queens were collected, which was much faster than expected from prior experience.

The lesson from all of this? There is a huge difference between healthy and thriving when it comes to ant keeping, and the most important thing to find when keeping ants is what food source will let them thrive!

Weekly Top Shot: Southern Trapjaw Ant