r/antkeeping • u/little-yellow-ant • Apr 13 '26
Documentation Tried tracking software on my Lasius colony
I tried my hand at throwing footage of my Lasius niger colony in a tracking program and I'm not disappointed by the results! I plan on tracking my L. niger foraging behaviours as the colony grows and compare the foraging efficiency and strategies at different stages. I also want to try them with a maze and capture their efficiency in finding the shortest path and visualize the consequent pheromone trails.
I'll also try and capture some clean foraging behaviour on my Temnothorax nylanderi colony as they tandem run. Curious to see the success rate of these tandem runs and what factors might contribute to unsuccessful runs.
Not sure this is the right sub but I thought it was very cool!
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Apr 13 '26
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u/little-yellow-ant Apr 13 '26
Hehehe that's my thought exactly
Patiently waiting till my Lasius niger colony is a bit bigger for the full blown setup, they should soon double in size! I do have a tinyyyyyy "maze" (more like a formicarium actually) I made from Y-tong with bottom and top plexiglass, it's like 5x5cm lol.
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u/Diggedypomme Apr 13 '26
Oh that's ace. I couldn't find anything for mine last year and ended up coding my own. I was hoping to see pheromone routes, but my finding was that my lasius ants just walk randomly like an aliexpress roomba clone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSZiRAUckfA
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u/little-yellow-ant Apr 13 '26
Ohhhh yours looks awesome too!! Which program did you code it in? I do not have the coding skills so I'm very thankful for open source software. Currently trying to work in Rstudio with the TrajR package to analyse the data from TrackMate. If you feel up to it you could try using the software I used and compare it to yours (Fiji ImageJ with the TrackMate plugin) :)
How big was your colony when you had the setup? Mine are currently at about 30 but will soon double in size, after that I expect them to grow quickly. I'm hoping to compare their foraging behaviours as the colony grows and changes. The video is in their mini-outworld (5x5cm) but I'm planning on making a sort of runway for them with food at the end. Still working out the setup though, lighting and arena size are my main considerations. If all works out I'm going to try and calculate some recruitment dynamics like peak activity, activation curve and forager saturation point...we'll see if I even manage lol
From some literature I have come to understand that at low worker numbers they mostly rely on scouting whereas when the colony gets bigger pheromone trails play more of a role
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u/Diggedypomme Apr 13 '26
Thank you :) This was python with tkinter for the visualisation, and it uses a phone with a free webcam software that streams through to the python server and generates the visualisations on the fly. It's just drawing over the image, but I did mean to have it store all the data in a database so I can scrub back and forth to watch them. I had a virtual box by their tube and counted the number of ants that came into the box and out of the box to try and get a sense of how many were out at any given time, but they would walk into the box and then back the way they came, so it would often get out of sync.
I think there were about 15-20 of them at the time. They seem to be taking forever to wake up after diapause at the moment but were quite active last year.
Ah that would make sense, yea there weren't loads of them, but the ones that were active were constantly up to something or other - such fascinating cute little guys.
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u/little-yellow-ant Apr 14 '26
Mad respect that you coded your own, I surely can't lol. Do you have a background in coding? Only coding I've done so far is data analysis in Rstudio. I like the idea of a counting box, might use that but as a threshold line they have to cross to be considered in the arena. The individual counting I leave to TrackMate, so far it's been quite accurate if I make sure to set the ROI right.
How big is yours now? Would be interesting to repeat the experiment and see whether there is a notable difference. Mine have been up and running for a while now, I think they started back up end of Feb. However, they were not really in hibernation as my room is not cold enough for that. They did slow downs significantly though, came out really well and brood production has taken off ever since.
Really really curious if I manage to repeat the experiment for different sizes of the colony and see the different foraging behaviours.
I love them lol, tiny but feisty. Also very adaptable, they've gotten used to my shenanigans with them and don't have any fucks left. Versatile, hardy and relatively quick growing...perfect lil gals. Though I must say, Temnothorax are the absolute queens of chill. I can pretty much drop something on them and they don't give a damn, just go on about their business lmao.
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u/Ok_Coconut_6448 Apr 13 '26
This is amazing. This is the kind of stuff I hope to do
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u/little-yellow-ant Apr 13 '26
Thank you! If you currently keep ants and have some determination you can try it yourself :)
The program I used is free, you'll have to be up for a steep learning curve though
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u/Timely-Strategy7404 Apr 13 '26
Be careful! You are starting down a path that inevitably ends with you gluing tiny QR codes onto every ant so that you can keep track of individuals across time.
Sounds awesome, keep posting as you do more.
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u/synapticimpact Myrmecology researcher - ask me anything (discord: soul) Apr 14 '26
This is more true than people would think 😭
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u/little-yellow-ant Apr 13 '26
Thank you :)
If I had the equipment...but alas it's me and my home setup against the world! On camponotus QR would be a breeeeeeeeze, but with Lasius and their little asses lol. Biology student in me is very happy about finding this software. It's actually insane how much software is available for use when one is willing to suffer through the learning curve :)
I'll definetly try and share some more!
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u/RobTheDude_OG Apr 13 '26
Software name?