Ants!

AIAS

Each CAST does 3 days of collecting ants across the entire island (within and without the infestation area) with centrifuge tubes baited with chunks of SPAM. When I say entire island I MEAN entire island. That means putting down a tube every 50m even if the means climbing on top of the "sealed" bunkers. All the grid points, roughly 400 of them, where we place the tubes are divided among the 5 of us and we each have to cover close to 80 points a day, twice because we walk the route of points putting out tubes labeled with their corresponding grid location and within 2hrs we have to re trace our route to collect them in the same order we put them out. Because of the magnitude of this survey and because these routes are only walked twice a year, we have to spend a lot of time clearing our routes and locating the grid points which are often times in the middle of dense vegetation (the easiest ones to locate are on the runway but they almost always have faded labels which have to be remade to make sure we're on the correct course). Once we've retrieved a tube we close it, sealing in whatever unfortunate ants are still feasting on the SPAM, and pop it back in a Ziploc bags. All the tubes go into the freezer for at least 48 hrs to make sure the ants are good and dead and then we can take them out and identify them. 

The purpose of this survey is again to make sure that we haven't been missing any YCA and also to keep tabs on the prevalence of different species of ant on JA. The worst case scenario is another destructive ant taking over the vacancy left by the YCA. 

I have personally witnessed army ants driving a mother Red Tail to abandon her egg by biting her incessantly over a period of 3 days. Since we are allowed to bait around camp and she was nesting right next to our basketball court/workout area, I even tried to lure the ants away from her but it was no use, she had no other choice but to leave. Hopefully she picks a better place to nest next time. 

Most of these emails are sporadic bits of info but I hope it's all making sense! I hope to give info about each species of bird with each email. I've also been painting different fish species and hope to draw my own map of Johnston. I wish I could share pictures easier, it's quite frustrating. 

- Anna