Well the original draft of this started with “Presently all
doing well at Grant Towers”…. But, as you’d expect of me, things are going
downhill.
The Acromyrmex octospinosus have got alates again,
not sure why this is happening but I’m not sure anyone knows. Maybe once it
starts it is an on-going problem? They
only seem to be in the new nest chamber, so I could strip it down and not risk
killing the queen, but I will try to be less invasive and offer more fruit and
early morning checks to catch them out and about (and then murder them).
“The weavers Oecophila
are doing well”, I’d written… But, maybe I shouldn’t write a draft but just
post straight away. I had thought they were starting to expand with one large
nest and what looks like a smaller satellite nest, but then I found the queen
outside the nest surrounded by workers. The next day the same, and then she was
wandering around on her own. Not good.
I have posted a question on the Antstore forum
So will hopefully get an answer to why this may be.
My Catalaphyllia jardinei
is looking a tad ropey the last week or so, it’s in a medium flow area in a
heavily fed tank and I’d dropped off the feeding schedule lately. A classic mistake with many corals when they
start to do well, you ignore them, then they crash.
I’ve moved it into a smaller, shallower tank with more light
that’s easier to access and will feed it daily so hopefully will see some
improvement soon. I really can’t kill
this, it’s one of the corals that seem to do well but aren’t bred, just
collected from the wild. BUT, although it’s easy to say you should only buy
captive bred, this offers nothing financially to the countries concerned with
trying to maintain their reefs. How much can they care about long term
solutions when we take their environmental property and make money out of it
instead of paying a little more and encouraging proper management of the reef?
If you enter “biopiracy” into a search engine it will come
up with lots of things about big pharmaceutical companies taking plants from
the rain forest and we all think they’re very naughty, but we rarely mention
corals.
(Ok, let’s ignore that the corals and fish are flown over in
tiny bags of heavy water…)
On a more positive note
I was also given another Polistes
colony.
These are housed in the same plastic tub but this time with no
furniture. This species is doing well in other collections in more basic
containers so I will mimic this for now.
The initial move was a pain as I had hoped to copy what I’d
seen and stick the nest to the walls with gaffer tape. However the nest didn’t
stick to the ropey old tape and it fell off. I then went back to super glue.
I will try not to kill these too quickly… (Maybe the person
who gave me them just doesn’t like wasps and knows that I AM pest
control……)
Although not invert’s I must mention Neoceratodus forsteri, the Australian lungfish, this species has
captivated me since I knew how unique, how hard to come by and how expensive they
were*. Stay tuned to hear more. Don’t touch that dial…
*Do you see a pattern emerging?
