Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Much has been said re: HL's being ant specialists, and it's true, they are in the wild, with most desert species' diets composed of 90% ants or so. I read Wade Sherbrooke's paper in Herp Review on keeping Regal HL on a diet of appropriately small crickets, dusted occasionally with calcium supplement. He made some interesting points, including: HL's like food of small size that they can catch easily--just snap up as it passes under their nose.

I also note that in the last 15 years or so, full-spectrum lighting has improved trememdously--I have some box turtles raised under ONLY full-spectrum indoor lighting, and at 7 years old, they are perfectly formed and robust. That would not have been possible in the old days.

SO--do HL's truly need ants, or will an alternative diet do in company with the best husbandry? I'm not ready to say for sure, but if they need Hymenopterans, why not collect some honeybees, freeze them, dry them, grind them to dust, and dust the crickets with honeybee powder? Bees and ants are pretty closely related; maybe if there is some particular ingredient in Hymenopteran meat, crikets dusted with bee powder will supply it. That might go for wasps, too. Most folks have access to bees and wasps--easier than ants sometimes. Just a thought.

Oh my god, bees scare me! Sounds like a great idea, but if I were to do it, someone else would have to do the whole catching and grinding up of the bees. I'm serious, bees really scare the living daylights out of me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one! You should market this idea. That way, I can just go into the pet store and get a bottle of dead crushed bees for dusting!

yellow jackets or huge, raving hornets. Who would be scared of a nice, happy, buzzing nest of hornets? Just kidding. I'm not too crazy about stinging insects myself, but I'm good with an insect net, so they lose. If the idea pans out, maybe powdered ants or bees could become a pet shop item. There are places (like my yard) where ants are a problem, and harvester ants are plentiful in the desert. Maybe I should look into supplying harvester ant powder....

I don't think anyone has ever actually identified what it is in ants that is needed by HLs. There's certainly no guarantee that whatever it is, it would be found in all species of ants even, let alone all hymenopterans. While ants, wasps, and bees are in the same taxonomic order, that's still a fairly high taxonomic grouping and represents tens of millions of years of divergent evolution. For example, just the split between the North and South American harvester ants is believed to have occurred over 30 million years ago. Bees and wasps are much more distantly related to them than that.

There certainly isn't anywhere near enough evidence to think that powdered bees or wasps (or even powdered ants) would be an adequate sustitute for live ants. To make sure one would have to either identify the "secret ingredient" in harvester ants, or do a comparative nutritional study between live ants and various powdered hymenopterans. Unfortunately that would require raising and keeping scores, if not hundreds, of HLs on very tightly controlled diets, possibly for their entire life spans. Not a small project either way.

Plus, you'd still have the problem of SherryLynn being more scared of the bees than the ants (although harvester ants sting worse than bees)

Not to be a party pooper though, I asked a question about alternative diets before and got some good info back. You can check out that thread here:

[url-http://forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=5695,5695] Optimized Captive Diets for HLs[/url]

Gary

the whole Hymenopteran substitute thing was just a thought. I do point out that the various species of HL feed on a wide spectrum of ants including carpenter ants (I wonder why those little toolbelts don't stick in the lizard's throats), honeypot ants, and others I have not seen the ID on, so it's still just possible that if there is a Magic Ingredient, it's available from other Hymenopterans besides desert harvester ants. Of course, HLs refuse certain introduced ants, and HL populations suffer in some localities where introduced ants are replacing the native ones. I suspect that this is more a matter of the introduced ants being unpalatable or too aggressive rather than lacking the magic ingredient. You are quite correct in pointing out that, in order to take this out of the realm of collector legend, a good clean controlled study would have to be done with sufficient data gathered to yield statistically valid results.

Alas, the line of least resistance is open to me, as I live in Arizona where we have to hack our way through phalanxes of harvester ants just to make it to the car to drive to work, so obtaining them is not a problem, should I decide to keep HLs captive, which I don't even do (gahhh! A lurker!). I'm merely intrigued by the whole topic of improving the lives of captive herps, and the lives of the keepers as well.

It's good that people think about such things. While such a large-scale study may never be done, if it ever is it'll be because people were thinking along those lines.

It would be interesting to know just what the "secret ingredient", or ingredients, is in ants that they need, and also what physiological price they pay, if any, for specializing on ants. Such a high degree of specialization would tend to indicate some pretty strong selective pressures and probable resultant adaptive costs.

I envy your access to the ants (though having lived for several years in Arizona I know they're not quite that common. I've started keeping HLs again, and will probably begin some HL research soon, so havng a ready supply like that would be nice. Hopefully I can locate some good Florida harvester territory and get the HLs to eat them. If not I may have to try to ID that secret ingredient myself...