When I first discovered formiculture.com I was quite impressed about this new forum. People from all over the world (but mainly from USA and Canada) shared their journals, nest building instructions and helped each other with identifying captured ants.
I was especially amazed about how polite and tolerant people are even if they have different opinions on specific topics.
However, it seems that a small group of elitist ant keepers who think they are the center of the ant keeping community have taken over the forum and try to enforce their agenda upon others.
It all started with a thread created by a Chinese ant keeper who just wanted to show some of his beautiful photos he made of his colonies.
Unfortunately, something happened that also happened in German ant forums a lot of times. A self-proclaimed ant protection advocate made the following comment:
I hope you aren’t extracting Dorylus colonies from the wild, and that this is just a small worker sample. The reproductive strategies of army ants do not allow for sustainable collection by hobbyists. Rather than producing hundreds or thousands of queens, army ants can only manage to create one additional colony at a time.
I responded with the following comment and asked him to provide any evidence that the species is threatened:
Is this genus threatened in the region he lives? if no I don’t see a problem.
Or to play the „evidence game“ (which has become quite popular in this forum lately): Is there any evidence that this species is threatened?
Of course, he couldn’t provide any evidence so he did the same what our elitist ant keepers did all the years in german forums he told me that other myrmecologists have the same opinion:
Sometimes you have to accept that we don’t live in a world where research has been done on every aspect of every ecological relationship. I am old enough to relay what other myrmecologists had to say about keeping Dorylinae back when myrmecologists liked coming to these forums. It’s not hard to reason that a single hobbyist’s ability to block an entire year of reproduction for a colony (or else remove the species entirely from the immediate environment) is not good for the species. If you are not satisfied with my answer, then ask somebody who knows more about this subfamily than you or I do.
So instead of providing evidence or admitting that he can’t and therefore can’t make any statement if collecting army ants in that region is harmful or not, he made this arrogant response. Is this how he does his research too, using names of other myrmecologists as replacement for providing evidence?
The whole discussion settled down so I thought this was over. But I was wrong. He created another thread in which he quoted another myrmecologist:
„(It is) Definitely not a good idea to collect colony queens of these ants. Unlike many other genera, Neivamyrmex and other army ant genera do not have nuptial flights as such. Instead males fly and hope to locate an appropriate colony with receptive virgin queens. Queens apparently are not produced every year and in very limited numbers. Considering the 100% death rate of collected material, collecting colony queens of a species whether officially endangered or threatened or what ever is not at all a sustainable practice and should not be done for anything other than valid scientific purposes.“
I asked again if he could provide any evidence and also gave an example of how scientists exploit environment:
Yep over collecting and trophy hunting should be exclusive to scientists I know . Like in this example. Every university and college with a department of biology collects huge amount of specimens every year with questionable use (especially for the species themself).
And yet again you didn’t provide any evidence that it is harmful to the population of army ants in China.
If he is really that concerned why does he restrict his answer to hobbyists?
Quote
This, and the poorly-understood nature of unabundant doryline colonies, indicates that it is definitely not appropriate for hobbyists (especially in North America) to keep army ants. I urge our hobbyists to appreciate and learn from Dorylinae but not in any way which could potentially threaten them. Furthermore, the vanity associated with keeping ants of this kind is wholly inappropriate. Remember that we are part of a growing community, and that we must be conscientious of our methodologies to work towards an ecologically sound future for the hobby.
Oh I know destroying nature for science is always ok and should not even be questioned.
Criticizing seems to trigger some of these elitist persons. Suddenly he demanded that I should provide evidence. Well I thought someone who makes a claim (like saying that something is harmful) has to provide evidence, maybe things work different in myrmecology.
Of course he also made the claim that myrmecologists and senior hobbyist have done so much for this community and made it possible. My response to that: None of the living myrmecologists made this hobby possible. Most of the techniques already existed some centuries ago because scientists already kept ants in artificial nests back then. Almost nothing that modern myrmecologists find out is of any use for ant keeping. Nothing myrmecologists found out so far was of any great use for humanity and nothing was of any use for the species they claim to care about. So please stop telling me how much I owe to myrmecologists, I owe nothing to them. If I buy a book I pay for it. If I read an article I pay for it too. Most of them don’t care about environment and are only interested in proceeding their own careers. It seems there is a direct proportionality between importance of the science discipline and arrogance of the scientist:
The less important a science discipline is for humanity the more arrogant the scientists of this discipline are.
If formiculture.com will continue giving this elitist people a platform the same thing is going to happen as with the largest German ant forum ameisenforum.de: It will divide into new forums.
And maybe in a few years you’ll sit in an almost empty forum like antdude does in his own forum nowadays and you can lecture yourself…
Update: The madness continues
It seems that I missed another example of this whole madness yesterday. A user asked for help with identifying a colony he caught. One sentence seemed to trigger some of the ant keeping social justice warriors quite heavily:
Found the nest between 2 big rocks small colony size about 100-150 workers
User Kevin expressed his disapproval:
You shouldn’t have collected that colony; 100 workers is not small.
Another user added that it is irresponsible:
It’s ecologically irresponsible to collect mature, native colonies.
It’s so funny how he can make this statement. The guy not even knows the species, he doesn’t know how common it is, he doesn’t know how large the colonies are etc. So, he can’t tell if it was irresponsible to collect this specific colony of this specific species. But captain planet wannabes don’t care about facts.
Can we PLEASE stop fighting now?
Can you SJWs just shut the fuck up and stop hijacking every thread you find something in it which is against your moral attitude?
The moderator I had fun with also gave his two cents:
Wild colonies tend to have trouble adapting to captivity. You see lots of new hobbyists post pictures of their freshly-caught pets, then the journals silently end one day.
This statement is so ridiculous, it is not even worth responding and of course it is not proven by any facts. If that is how he does any scientific research god help us all.
That are the senior ant keeper which made the community possible (according to them). But in my opinion they are more like the deluded ant keepers which try their best to destroy the community with their self-righteousness.