Ant Rants

19/11/2025

btw I'm on Xitter too:

Leo Ryberg - I study infiltration, slavery and mind control in ants. Independent researcher of villainous insects. Script/Narration: Barrskogens Drottning (SVT)

18/11/2025

If you mostly hide around and avoid being seen, but p**p defensively whenever confronted, you might be a termite inquiline.

13/11/2025

If your growth hack is stealing your competitor's children, you might be Polyergus.

13/11/2025

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you get off on enslaving your sisters, you might be in Polyergus.

12/11/2025

Why have impostor syndrome when you can have inquiline confidence?

29/10/2025

So today is the day, my movie is dropping on SVT Play.

If you're in Sweden, you can see it here:

https://www.svtplay.se/video/8opXJPn/barrskogens-drottning

For international viewers, it is unfortunately not available yet, but I might translate it to English at some point further down the timeline.

En närgången skildring av ett år i stackmyrans värld. Vi följer en nykläckt drottnings kamp för att grunda en ny koloni. För att lyckas behöver hon använda all sin list och slipade sociala förmåga, men också en hel del tur. Naturens egna thriller där vi får se myrans liv på ett sätt...

13/09/2023

Using my newly constructed macro imaging setup - a pretty cool device that I call 'AntScanner3000' or 'The Discernment', depending on mood and level of Seriousness™, I did an experiment scanning this particular ant I found - a miniaturised Formica sp. queen found in my local neighborhood, in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden.

This video is stitched together from 4320 separate photos.

11 photos were taken at each degree of rotation, at approximately 1mm intervals. Then the sharp parts of those photos were put together into 360 composite images, forming a full lapse with the entire ant in focus.

These 360 images were then put in sequence and turned into a video.

This video was then processed through one round of detail recovery / resolution enhancement / denoise / deblur using an AI model, followed by three rounds of frame interpolation, in order to smoothen the rotation. Having just the original 360 frames felt kinda choppy.

This is the first viable result I have gotten out of the process. I am still experimenting to make the most of my newly built tools so you will see more of this type of stuff, and probably in better quality, in the future.

This footage should be good enough to get a species-level ID or at least get close to one. This queen is thus far unidentified, and I am failing to key it to any local species.

Ant is approximately 6mm in length and is superficially similar to a F. cinerea worker. Thorax is that of a queen though, and when she was first captured, she was winged, although the wings were removed by host workers during a failed attempt at parasitic introduction. (Don't worry, I got good footage of her winged as well)

Form implies heavily that this is a parasite. She is similar to queens of the nearctic Microgyna species group, but the find is strange, because I am not in the New World.

So far I am just calling this Formica sp. "wtf".

I have never seen a similar ant queen. Thus, I am in the process of making a proper and formal description of the specimen.

As I have never done actual and proper taxonomy before, I wanna low-key reach out to people who are actual academics, which I am not, for some assistance. I am a total amateur (but very nerdy) and have zero experience in academia.

13/04/2022

Some stills I screenshotted from a 4k video Tobias sent me. He's roaming about, trying out his new cool camera equipment.

Even just screencaps of this film approach macro photo quality imho. This summer some ants sure are getting filmed.

Pictured: Formica rufa on their mound, in a suburb of Stockholm. They are currently getting the colony started for the year, and rebuilding the parts of their mound that have collapsed during winter.

They have to get ready for their yearly nuptial, which is held uncommonly early in the year - in May to early June.

I am still waiting for my *photogenic* ant nests. It will probably be a couple of weeks before they arrive.

My current setups pretty much still all look like lab experiments. This is why I don't show them more.

But I'm getting both new, more natural-looking nests quite soon, as well as the the equipment I need to start my ant slow-tv live feed.

13/04/2022

Swedish science journalist and myrmecologist Katja Bargum showing off one of my ant colonies on Swedish TV channel TV4.

I imagine this experience in the national limelight will turn my Campos into total divas. They will probably stop accepting normal mealworms, and instead they will demand royal jelly.

12/04/2022

Some fun news - if you're in Sweden, tune in to TV4 Nyhetsmorgon tomorrow and you'll see my ant colonies.

A local ant expert is releasing a new book about ants and she's getting interviewed on TV. The production company wanted some live ant colonies to show, and I lent them three small live colonies and a pinned Dinomyrmex.

I dunno yet how much will be shown, but hopefully my ants will not turn into total divas now