Pest Library

Characteristics

The red harvester ants are big ants. They are commonly 1/4 to 1/2 inch in size. This ant is red to dark brown in color and has a somewhat square head.

Habitat

The red harvester ant lives in open grassland or in areas where clay loam soil is present. To create their habitat, they will remove the vegetation around them in a somewhat circular fashion and create the crater at the center, which will be the opening of their habitat. Their colonies are usually dispersed from each other.

Behavior

The ants live within a colony that consists of a single queen, male and female reproductives, and sterile female workers. The workers in particular, have different tasks over their one year life period, which are nest maintenance worker, forager, patroller, and midden worker.

The red harvester ants will commonly start their foraging as the sun rises. The patrollers will come out first to scout in different places and will locate the food sources as early as 6:00 a.m., then will come back to their nest while leaving a trail for the foragers to follow.

Food

These ants feed on grass seeds and dead insects. These ants will harvest Needle Grama, love grass, panic grass, crabgrass, millet, barley, panic grass, centipede grass, grass burs and Texas Winter Grass seed. They will collect these foods and bring them back to the colony. Although they prefer seeds, they can also collect mites, lice, maggots, snails, worms, millipedes, silverfish, spiders, and so many more.

Life Cycle

The colony of a red harvester ant has only one queen. She can produce alates or reproductive females and males, and sterile female workers. Although the queen can produce female reproductives, these possible queens will not share her colony. Once they are able to swarm and mate, they will not comeback in the queen’s colony. Instead, they will create a colony of their own. The survival of a new colony relies on the female reproductive to create their own colonies. Only 1% of these female reproductives will survive and make it underground.

The colony will only have one queen, and all the workers are the queen’s offspring. A single colony may live depending on the lifespan of the queen. When the queen dies, the colony dies. Luckily, the queen can live for 15 to 20 years while producing 10,000 workers per year. These workers will only have one year to live. But, that is just enough for the queen since she can produce the same amount of workers or more each year.

Other Information and Tips

The red harvester ants can sometimes become pests when they create colonies that can ruin a landscape. However, they are not as a destructive as the red imported fire ants or leaf cutting ants. In fact, these two species are impacting the population of the red harvester ants by competitive exclusion. The proper management for these ants is to just let them be, especially if they are in areas inhabited by the endangered Texas horned lizard, which feeds on harvester ants.