Thorny devils

[Colin]

I've always been interested if it would be possible scenting pinkies and or crickets with crushed black ants and get young thorny devils to take them. It would be much easier if they could be weaned onto food sources that are more accessable to the average keeper if thats even possible at all?

Be a long process though I imagine :lol:

I did hear about 1 person trying to develop a formic acid substitute in a spray, so you just sprayed any small crickets & feed, no idea if anything came of it

just saw your post moreliaman. interesting stuff.

 

[levis04]

thorny devils are very easy to look after and breed in captivity, as long as you have theants. if they occur around you area then you should have the right ants. i have a very good friend that breeds a heap every year i think he might be putting them up for sale this year, to keep a constant supply of ants he runs dog food and honey through a dripper hose, that starts where the ants are and runs through most of his enclosures. there was a good article in one of the latest reptile aus mags by the reptile centre or desert park on them. they are better kept outside in pits. the best thing about the thornys is if you have the ants they will look after them selves.

 

[fuegan13]

slightly off topic..... but is there anyway to get a queen ant besides digging up an ant nest ? and is digging up ants nests legal anyway ?
like do people sell them or anything >???

(no im not looking to get a thorny devil even thou they are extremly cool..... )

 

[Hickson]

I've always been interested if it would be possible scenting pinkies and or crickets with crushed black ants and get young thorny devils to take them.

If you could get them eating pinkies they would end up being very sick lizards. Their diet now consists primarily of chitin, the exoskeleton of the ants. Pinkies have almost no chitin in any form on them.

Keeping, breeding and feeding have all been discussed in previous threads, including a trio that was kept in North Sydney for a few years. Do a search on the word Moloch.



Hix

 

[addy]

slightly off topic..... but is there anyway to get a queen ant besides digging up an ant nest ? and is digging up ants nests legal anyway ?
like do people sell them or anything >???

(no im not looking to get a thorny devil even thou they are extremly cool..... )

Yes there is. At certain times of year, and perhaps less often than every year, ants will gather around their nest in massive number. They will release about a thousand prospective queen ants.
They appear slighly diffrent from the regular ant depending on the species. But these ants will have wings. They will all fly off in their own direction and about 99.9% will fall victim to spiders, dragon flies, starvation and other predators. The idea is that they will form their own colony of ants.
If you capture one of these winged ants, and it survives..there you go,,a queen ant..

No idea what you have to do to get it started. If she just starts laying eggs by herself or if she needs to make contact with another ant, i don't know. I've never tried it.

 

[PhilK]

She needs a male drone ant. That's hard to come by. Veerryy hard.

 

[dragons75]

Is chitin the same exo skeleton mealies have ? If so you could possibly feed on mealies if you either used there skin after shedding or chopped them up finely enough. And yeah i wish i had some too

 

[jonesc1]

She needs a male drone ant. That's hard to come by. Veerryy hard.

If they're like bees, which im fairly sure they are, if the queen doesn't mate she will lay unfertilised eggs. These eggs will develop into males, drones, which she will then mate with. She will then lay fertilised eggs which develop into the workers. So in theory a single queen would be able to start a new colony.

 

[grimbeny]

Really a female could lay unfertilised eggs that develope into males, very interesting becaus usually when this occurs you get clones of the parent ie more females. The whole queen scenario is very unusual and interesting though. I wonder what the difference is when the queen decides to release all the females and who mates whith her to produce them as opposed to normally when she only produces drones and workers and the like.

 

[$NaKe PiMp]

i have heard that at a zoo in alice springs they use wood with holes drilled in it and put honey
in the holes then putthe wood where there are ants are they go into al the holes to get honey then thy bring the wood into enclosure and the molochs eat the ants!!

 

[hazzard]

If they're like bees, which im fairly sure they are, if the queen doesn't mate she will lay unfertilised eggs. These eggs will develop into males, drones, which she will then mate with. She will then lay fertilised eggs which develop into the workers. So in theory a single queen would be able to start a new colony.

Close but so far away!

In honeybees
Queens produce unfertilised eggs if unmated known as drones by pathenogenesis. These develop into males which can then fly into the sky and mate with virgin queens. A queen that has started laying unfertilised eggs will never then go out and mate. It's just a survival mechanism to get some part of it's genetics into the next generation. Colonies that have drone laying queens simply die out! Queen bees can only mate in the sky not in there colony!

On top of this you would need workers to feed and rear the larvae into drones as the queen does not have developed hypopharangeal glands to be able to do this. Simply a honeybee colony cannot be produced from a single queen.



Workers can similarly develop ovaries (in the presence of no queens) and develop drone offspring which can the go and mate with queens.

 

[Vincent]

I saw one recently in Melbourne that was living on baby crickets. It was going very well on them. At the time i was there, it had only been in captivity for a couple of months ( I think ), and had been fed only baby crickets. Interesting to see how it goes on them long term.

 

[expansa1]

I think they're awesome lizards as well. As mentioned, all you need is a few colonies of ants on your property and you're sweet!

 

[bump73]

Expansa. is that yours?

If so how do you actually collect the ants??
Ben

 

[Hickson]

i have heard that at a zoo in alice springs they use wood with holes drilled in it and put honey
in the holes then putthe wood where there are ants are they go into al the holes to get honey then thy bring the wood into enclosure and the molochs eat the ants!!

The Alice Springs Desert Park uses old bits of termite mound drizzled with honey - works a treat! In outdoor enclosures they just put the honey on the ground, and the moloch stands beside the ant trail feeding on the moving buffet.



Hix

 

[wokka]

Ants arn't ants. Apparently of the 400 different types of ants in Australia thorny devils eat 12 types.

 

[mattmc]

expansa is that yours. DUDE they are cool as. 1 of my fav reps

 

[expansa1]

I think they're awesome lizards as well. As mentioned, all you need is a few colonies of ants on your property and you're sweet!

Was for a while. We have a lot of black ants on our property but not enough during winter and the wet season.

 

[Moreliaman]

Im sure you could got out and get a mated queen specie of ant that the devil eats, i know all ants arent the same, but there must be one of the species that (like ant colonies over here do) have yearly swarms to expand, producing hundreds of winged queens an winged drones that fly out of the nest, when the female has been mated her wings fall off & then you catch her up & start your ant colony.
Im sure its allot of effort, i couldnt imagine anyone having much free time looking after these guys.

 

[geckodan]

An associate of mine has bred them to second generation in outdoor pits using nothing more than a chicken drumstick once a week in a wire cage to attract ants into the enclosure. Despite what has been written about them "requiring" an ant trail and a reluctance to chase individual ants, they spent as much time patrolling the perimeter of the pit (which had a wire mesh floor) picking off individual ants attracted to the food source. They were by far the easiest species he has kept BUT he had an appropriate ant species living locally.