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Day 3: Wood Ant Colony

10/29/2015

Tree 1
   Type: coniferous
   Circumference: 20 cm
   Distance from tree to colony: 90 cm

Tree 2
   Type: coniferous
   Circumference: 104 cm
   Distance from tree to colony: 20 cm

Tree 3
   Type: coniferous
   Circumference: 63 cm
   Distance: 44 cm

Canopy Cover: 75%
Green Ground Cover: 5%
Rating: 6%

Height of Colony: 70 cm
Diameter of Colony: 206 cm

Today we went to the forest to observe our ant mound. We were surprised that there was not much activity as the weather was very nice. We continued to observe the biotic factors surrounding colony Z.

Questions:

The wood ant colony is dependent on the species in its surrounding environment, as all organisms are in an ecosystem. Therefore, it is useful to observe and record information about the trees around the wood ant colony.
The independent variable would be having two trees and they would be different sizes. The dependent variable would be the differences in the ant mounds because of the different tree sizes.
Respiration is the process by which heat is given off when work is done so we believe that this would be the process to melt the snow off of the ant mounds.

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Wood Ant Research Project- Day 1

10/7/2015

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Ant Colony Mapping

Day one:

September 28 2015

We went out on a walk through the Beau Reveil forest to find the most optimal ant hill for our research purposes. We tagged 3 different mounds, mound Z, X and U. We recored the temperature, location and amount of activity at each anthill. On day 1, we did not focus in detail on the characteristics of the individual ant mounds as we were focused on simply locating several ant hills for us to use to carry out our future observations. Below is a sample of our observations taken at the ant hill Z.

mound Z
temperature: 8 -13 °C
Longitude: 46' 20'28 "N
Latitude: 7' 0'2 "E
Activity: Yes

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Wood Ant Research Project- Day 2

10/5/2015

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On day 2, we observed the surrounding environment of our mound and we collected three ant specimens. We observed the biotic factors surrounding the ant colony which were the ants themselves, the grass and moss on the forest floor and the canopy cover. The abiotic factors were the dirt and forest material that make up the ant mound. The ants, like all other living organisms, must acquire nutrition from their ecosystem in order to survive. We think that the ants must be consuming the plants and smaller insects that they co-exist with on the forest floor. It would be interesting to observe the different factors affecting the prosperity of the ants such as the weather, the amount of light and the quality of the soil they use to build their mounds.
Listed are our observations from day 2 of the project:

Colony name: Mont Blanc
Canopy cover: 80%
Green ground cover: 21.6%
Activity level: 8/10
Longitude: 7° 0' 3'' East
Latitude: 46° 20' 27'' North

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Day 3: Wood Ant Colony

Wood Ant Research Project- Day 1

Ant Colony Mapping

Day one:

Wood Ant Research Project- Day 2

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