A First in Antkeeping: Lasius colei!
- Anthony Prothero
- Jul 5
- 2 min read
Stateside Ants is excited to announce that we have, currently, the first colony of Lasius colei, a mysterious and poorly documented species, in captivity! Below, we will detail their strange habits!
The colony began with a queen in July 2025, who was introduced to a few workers of Lasius americanus. Since then, they've grown smoothly and quickly to number more than 500 biological workers.
This queen couldn't begin her own colony without Lasius americanus workers because she's considered a social parasite. In the wild, she locates a colony of another Lasius species, disguises her scent to match that of the colony, and infiltrates it, eventually dispatching its native queen and taking her place, using her new workforce to raise her first few generations of workers.
If that's not interesting enough, there's more mystery surrounding this species: they're completely subterranean.
This species, after the hosts all die out, lives entirely underground, tending root aphids, forming huge galleries and tunnels to find the best location to farm their root aphid livestock. We don't truly know how large these colonies get or how they're structured aside from when we get little glimpses into their lives. This captive colony is giving us an even more interesting glimpse!
As seen in the video, the queen is physogastric. This is when her gaster inflates full of fats to accommodate laying large numbers of eggs!
As far as we know, this is the FIRST time this species has ever been kept in captivity.
Discoveries like this are the reason Stateside Ants exists. We've always believed antkeeping and real scientific understanding go hand in hand. We believe that a hobbyist raising a poorly documented species can genuinely add to what's known about it, in a substantive way. Advancing that knowledge, and eventually the conservation of the species behind it, is the mission that drives everything we do here. Often, a hobbyist can even discover new behaviors about a species that's very well documented! Antkeeping is extremely important to science. We'll keep sharing what this remarkable colony teaches us!
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