The Urban Pantheist

This summer has been unusually dry--we've had something like 2 inches of rain the entire summer (we average over 3 inches per month). As a mushroom guy, I've found it quite depressing. One day I woke up and the yard was a bit damp. I quickly moved from place to place to try to find live revived by the moisture. This may be Mycena corticola.


The north facing side of the shingle roof of our shed is thickly decorated with British soldier lichen.


A nearly hexagonal raft of infinitesimal bubbles on our bird bath.


Ants in general don't seem to be suffering in the drought, at least it seems many species are doing fine.

The presence of the jeweler's loupe here is a hint that this is a very small organism. We generally think of ants as small animals, but this species is the smallest I've ever seen. Each worker is just about 1 mm in length.


Their size and distinctive coloration--dark in the front with light legs and abdomen--identifies them as ghost ants Tapinoma melanocephalum*. Like many inhabitants of the great indoors, their origin is not precisely known. They are from the Old World Tropics for sure, narrowing it down to roughly a third of the surface of the planet.


A colony could form in a pile of dead leaves, or in between a plant pot and it's protective liner. As long as the place is warm and humid, the ghost ants can live happily, feeding on miniscule amounts of sweet things and dead insects. When a colony is successful, some amount of it departs to become a new colony--"budding" instead of the complex new colony creation that some other eusocial insects endure. Besides all the tropics and heated greenhouses in the world, ghost ants live in Florida and Texas, and appear to be spreading.

* Humble and dark-headed

When people tell me they have ants indoors, I ask how big. If they say small, they're probably pavement ants or odorous house ants that are nesting in the cement of the floor or foundation. If they say big, well, then I know the building is in need of repair. Often I'll ask if the ceiling leaked last time it rained--usually it did. These eastern black carpenter ants Camponotus pennsylvanicus* only move in if there's some nice water-damaged wood for them to nest in.

The main nest is in the dead part of a live tree. The ants travel across the branches at night, into the upper levels of wood construction of a building. If there's water damaged wood they can work with their mandibles, they'll bring over several dozen of their larvae. They bring the larvae not just to have a ready-made supply of new workers, but to help them eat. Adult ants can't eat solid food, so they bring bits of insects to the larvae, who chew them up and regurgitate liquid the adults can lap up. Besides dead insects, carpenter ants like sugar-rich foods, like aphid honeydew and discarded and carelessly stored human food.

Carpenter ants are a critical part of the forest ecosystem. They move into trees that have been weakened by fungi to build their nests. Large woodpeckers come to feed on the colony, opening up cavities in the dead wood. Cavity nesting birds depend on these sites to reproduce. Wood ducks, for example, are unable to make their own cavities in which to nest, and thus depend on woodpeckers, carpenter ants, and wood decaying fungi in order to successfully reproduce.

* Camponotus means "flat back", referring to the flattened or weakly curved dorsal mesosomal profile of most Northern Hemisphere species.

Last fall we had a Norway maple cut down. It doesn't quite know that it's dead yet, and has been spending the early part of the spring oozing sap up to the stump. This weekend I noticed this swarm of ants gathering to lap up the sweet juice.


The two nodes between the thorax and abdomen, along with their size and color, strongly imply that these are Tetramorium sp., commonly called pavement ants. Pavement ants are native to Europe, but have become very common in New England, adapting readily to urban ecosystems (note the common name).

Ants dismembering a yellowjacket carcass.

Here we are at Inn Magnolia! We got this opportunity because I'll be leading a mushroom walk the Inn is sponsoring, next week.

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Cottontails are extra visible this time of year--babies are coming out of the nests, and adults are grazing on all the new spring vegetation.
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Here's a very random set of photos that are in my folder preventing me from doing anything else until I post them. This first one is an ant doing something weird, I think tending a scale insect to get honeydew, but I've never really seen a scale insect and don't know if that's what this is.

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Weather is especially unpredictable if you are an ant. Sometimes it's brightly sunny, but it's raining very heavily anyway!


Sometimes it also rains winter moth caterpillars, and these are delicious presents for the queen and the brood.

This funnel-weaving grass spider (Probably Agelenopsissp.) has built its web on the back of the shed, positioning the narrow part of the tunnel under a loose piece of sheet metal. Other spiders of this type are all around the yard--in the rock wall by the driveway, the tall weeds along the small yard fence, and so on.

If you are compiling a list of creatures that live around people and their buildings, this spider is a reliable entry. It is unreliable, however, when it comes to assigning it a common name. I have chosen one that I previously rejected as too cumbersome because it avoids confusion with many other spiders, including Australia's deadly funnel web spider. The funnel-weaving grass spider spins a sheet-like horizontal web with a narrow tunnel hidden in the back. The spider waits in the tunnel for a vibration indicating an insect has fallen in the trap. One imagines that crickets and grasshoppers, flinging themselves into the air willy-nilly, are common prey. Blundering flies, moths, and caddisflies are likely as well.

A slavemaking ant placed into this web was investigated, then deliberately ignored by the spider. I felt a little bad about the trapped ant, but only a little.


"Help meee! YOU BASTARD!"

This type of spider was 365 urban species #265, and was in the Urban Nature Picture for September 3, 2010.