[CAMPONOTUS LAEVIGATUS]

With March's warming rains, flying carpenter ants begin to swarm from the hidden homes where they were raised among their flightless brethren. For a few delirious hours they mingle and fall from the air like dark confetti amid ravenous birds and chipmunks. Out of countless thousands of adults, only a handful of reproductive males and future queens survive to establish new colonies. Fertilized queens who successfully run the gantlet of hungry mouths burrow into soft rotten wood, drop their wings and lay a small batch of eggs that they nourish to adulthood by metabolizing their own body tissues. Colonies eventually grow until thousands of workers support a single queen, who lays hundreds of thousands of eggs over her 10- to 20-year lifespan. Tunneling into dead and decaying wood, colonies

of these large ants create niches for microbes,

fungus and small invertebrates that help recycle nutrients in the forest ecosystem.

NATURAL HISTORY

Carpenter ants don't actually eat wood, but favor a mixed diet of insects and sweet nectar secreted by aphids. Highly evolved bacteria that live inside specialized cells in the ant's gut biosynthesize unique amino acids to help carpenter ants supplement their nutritional intake.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS

These half-inch long black ants are extremely common in forested areas of the Sierra Nevada and coastal mountain ranges, such as the San Gabriels.