Camponotus sp. "titanicus"

If you have arrived here searching for “Camponotus titanicus” or “titan ants”, this is the care sheet for the Camponotus that we sell at Antomas as Camponotus sp. “titanicus”: a huge African carpenter ant from high-mountain areas, with a body that is dark and matt in our colonies and major workers with colossal heads. And it is best to start with the most important point: “titanicus” is not a scientific name. It is a trade name, given because of its size, and the species behind it has not yet been identified: as far as science is concerned, it does not exist yet.

That is why this care sheet is a little different from the others. There are no published studies on this particular species, so we carefully separate three things: what science knows about the genus Camponotus and its African relatives, what has actually been measured in giant ants, and what we have learnt at Antomas from rearing this line. And what we have measured in our colonies is impressive: queens of 23 to 26 mm and majors of more than 20 mm, larger than any Camponotus with published measurements that we have found. On top of that, there is a great deal to tell: fossil ants the size of a hummingbird, the other “titan” that hunts termites, workers that change jobs after a single injection, and a liquid that ants pass from mouth to mouth and that influences the size of the next generation.

Biology

“Camponotus titanicus”: a trade name, not a species

In the product name, Camponotus is the genus, and that much is clear. “sp.” is short for species: it is written when we know which genus an ant belongs to, but not which species. And the quotation marks around “titanicus” show that it is a trade name, a label to tell this line apart from other African Camponotus, not a published name. It owes the name to its size: “titanicus” comes from the Titans, the giants of Greek mythology, and in this case the name is no exaggeration. For a name to be scientific, someone has to describe the species in a publication, with reference specimens deposited in a museum, following the rules of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. That has not happened with “titanicus”.

We have checked: the world ant catalogue (AntCat, consulted through GBIF) contains no Camponotus titanicus, nor titanus, nor titan. No source links this ant to a described species or to any particular subgenus, and so we do not assign it to one: we would rather say that we do not know than make it up. It is, therefore, an unidentified species which, as far as science is concerned, does not exist yet. This is the usual way of selling an ant that circulates in the hobby before anyone has studied it, as happens in our shop with Camponotus sp. “Devil Candy” or Camponotus sp. “guangxi”.

An arched back and more than a thousand species

The genus was created by the Austrian entomologist Gustav Mayr in 1861, and its name describes these ants in profile: it comes from the Greek kampé, “curve”, and nôton, “back”, after the arched dorsum of the thorax. In English they are known as carpenter ants, because many species dig their nests in dead wood. The type species, the one that anchors the name of the genus, is European: Camponotus ligniperda.

It is an enormous genus. The revision by Ward and Boudinot (2021) speaks of more than a thousand species described and several hundred subspecies, and only Pheidole rivals it for the title of the most diverse ant genus on the planet. Until recently it was even larger: in 2016, Ward, Blaimer and Fisher moved Colobopsis, the ants with plug-shaped heads, and Dinomyrmex, the giant of South-East Asia, into genera of their own. Many of the African Camponotus were described between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, often as subspecies or “forms”, and more than a hundred names have built up around C. maculatus alone. Against that background, it is no oddity for a large African Camponotus to reach the hobby without a name.

One of the largest Camponotus known

In our colonies, the queens measure 23–26 mm and some majors exceed 20 mm. To understand what that means, you have to compare it with what has actually been measured in giant Camponotus:

• Dinomyrmex gigas, the giant ant of the forests of South-East Asia, used to be called Camponotus gigas. Pfeiffer and Linsenmair studied its colonies in Malaysia: its major workers can reach about 3 cm and 400 mg, with a head almost 7 mm wide on average. But since 2016 it has no longer been a Camponotus.
• Camponotus singularis, also Asian, is the largest Camponotus with published measurements that we have found: majors of 16.8–19.6 mm and winged queens of 18.4–20.5 mm (Laciny and colleagues, 2016).
• Camponotus angusticollis, which is often cited as a size benchmark, is not African: it ranges from India and Sri Lanka to Indonesia. And we have not found any scientific measurements of it; the ones that circulate come from shops.
• African Camponotus. Among those with published measurements, the largest majors are around 15–17 mm: in C. brutus, for example, a major of 15.4 mm was measured among specimens from Nigeria. The largest African queen we have found described is that of C. langi, from the Congo, at 21 mm (Wheeler, 1922).

With these measurements, the queens of “titanicus” are larger than those of every Camponotus with published measurements that we have found, and its largest majors exceed the biggest majors of C. singularis. Is it the largest in the genus? With more than a thousand species, many of them never measured, there is no way to be sure, and we prefer not to proclaim it. What we can say is that it is one of the largest Camponotus known. To put it in perspective, the longest ant alive today is the queen of an African army ant, Dorylus wilverthi: she reaches about 52 mm, and about 80% of her body is gaster, an egg factory for colonies of millions of workers.

A giant from the African mountains

Our colonies come from high-mountain areas of Africa, and it shows in the way it lives at home. In Antomas’s experience, it does not like heat, does best in a mild nest and benefits from a marked winter rest: just the opposite of many tropical exotics, which want warmth all year round.

The mountains of tropical Africa have a climate very different from that of the forests and savannas around them. In the highlands they come from, the mean temperature is around 16 °C for most of the year, several degrees lower than in the nearby lowlands, and the rain falls in wet seasons separated by a long dry season. There is no winter like ours, but there is a cool, stable climate, which explains why this ant copes badly with hot summers (see “Recommended parameters”).

There were ants the size of a hummingbird: Titanomyrma

If we are looking for an ant that has truly earned the name of titan, we have to travel back some 50 million years. In 2011, Archibald and colleagues described Titanomyrma, from the Greek titan, the giant of mythology, and myrmex, “ant”. The large species, Titanomyrma gigantea, had been described in 1986 from fossils from the Messel pit, in Germany. Its queens reached about 7 cm in length and some 16 cm in wingspan; the new species from Wyoming, T. lubei, measured about 5 cm, and its authors compared it to a hummingbird.

The most interesting thing is not the size, but the journey. Ants of this group had only turned up at fossil sites with a very warm climate, with mean annual temperatures of about 20 °C or more. So how did they get from Europe to North America? The 2011 proposal was that they crossed via the Arctic during the warming peaks of the early Eocene, when the pole became mild enough to open a “gateway” for them. In 2023 a specimen turned up in cool uplands in British Columbia, Canada, with a mean annual temperature of 13 °C or less. It is distorted, and its size in life lies somewhere between about 3.3 and about 5 cm: if it was a giant, the idea that these ants needed warmth is on shaky ground. Its authors leave the question open. A word of caution: Titanomyrma belongs to an extinct subfamily and is not a close relative of Camponotus.

The other “titan ants”

Anyone searching for “titan ants” also comes across two American Pheidole. One is Pheidole rhea, which in our Spanish shop we call “Hormiga Titánica”. The other carries the title in its scientific name: Pheidole titanis Wheeler, 1903, from the south-western United States and western Mexico. Its name alludes to the Titans, although its soldiers are less than a centimetre long.

This one really is a specialist termite hunter. Its scouts locate the foraging columns of Nasutitermes termites and recruit an army of 200 to 2,000 workers, which surround the termites and carry them back to the nest one by one. In 1988, Donald Feener discovered that a parasitoid phorid fly, which flies only by day and tries to lay its eggs in the ants, changes the ant’s timetable: in the wet season, most raids become nocturnal, and when a fly appears, the colony stops hunting to defend itself. And this despite the fact that, in dissections, less than 2% of the ants were parasitised: a rare enemy with an enormous effect.

A termite hunter, but not a specialist

It is not a termite specialist, but it does hunt them: at Antomas we have seen videos filmed where it comes from in which they raid termites, and at home they take them very readily. This fits with what is known about the genus:

• Opportunistic hunters. Camponotus and Pheidole are the two large genera that hunt termites opportunistically, when they come across them, as Yusuf, Crewe and Pirk (2014) note. In the Lamto savanna, in the Ivory Coast, Lévieux (1982) found termites among the prey of Camponotus, mixed in with beetles, flies, centipedes, cicadas and mantises, in a diet in which honeydew also counts for a great deal: C. maculatus, for example, exploits scale insects on roots.
• The African specialist is another ant. Africa’s great termite hunter is Megaponera analis (formerly Pachycondyla analis), a ponerine that feeds almost exclusively on termites and raids them in columns.
• Tenants of termite nests. What some Camponotus do is take advantage of termite nests. In the Congo, the American Museum of Natural History expedition found a colony of C. vividus living in the large carton nest built by an arboreal termite (Wheeler, 1922). And in New Guinea, a Camponotus was the most frequent tenant of termite nests on a coconut plantation: it reared its brood inside, the termites walled off the occupied galleries, and in some cases the two lived together for up to nearly three years without any noticeable increase in termite mortality (Leponce and colleagues, 1999).

So, if you can get hold of them, termites are excellent prey for it, although not essential: as part of a varied diet, it accepts almost any insect (see “Feeding”).

Large and small: size is not everything

Like almost all Camponotus, this ant has workers of very different sizes: nimble, long-legged minors, and majors with disproportionately large heads. In 1953, Edward O. Wilson explained that this polymorphism is, above all, a matter of growth: as worker size increases, the head grows faster than the rest of the body. That is why majors have those disproportionately large heads. In our colonies the difference is enormous: there are majors of several sizes, and the largest exceed 20 mm and have a massive head capable of cutting skin (see “Handling and safety”).

For decades it was taken for granted that size determined the job: the minors go out to look for food and tend the brood, and the majors defend. In 2016, Daniel Simola and colleagues showed with Camponotus floridanus that it is not so rigid. The majors of this species hardly ever forage, but when the researchers injected an inhibitor of histone deacetylases, enzymes that regulate which genes are read, into the brains of young majors, they began to forage like minors, and they carried on doing so. Each worker’s job is written in her size, but also in chemical marks in the brain that can be rewritten.

More than food: what they pass from mouth to mouth

Ants pass liquid food to one another mouth to mouth, a behaviour called trophallaxis, and for a long time it was thought to be just that: shared food. In 2016, Adria LeBoeuf and colleagues analysed this fluid in Camponotus floridanus and found much more: dozens of proteins, many of them secreted into the fluid itself, 64 microRNAs, hydrocarbons similar to those that make up the colony odour and juvenile hormone, one of the hormones that govern insect development.

Then they put it to the test. They added juvenile hormone to the food of groups of workers caring for larvae, and the larvae those workers reared were twice as likely to complete metamorphosis and became larger workers. In other words, what the workers pass from mouth to mouth helps to decide the size of the next generation. When you see two workers with their mouths together and their antennae busy, they are not just feeding: they are communicating.

Night shifts and queens without a clock

Many large Camponotus are mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, but their internal clock is more flexible than it seems. In 2017, Mildner and Roces studied Camponotus rufipes: in isolation, most workers followed a daily rhythm, mainly nocturnal; inside the colony, nurses with brood to look after were active day and night, with no 24-hour rhythm, and recovered it as soon as they were separated. Foragers, on the other hand, spent up to half their time motionless and adjusted their schedule to when food was available.

Something similar happens with queens. In the Indian species Camponotus compressus, Sharma and colleagues found in 2004 that virgin queens and males have a clear circadian rhythm, but that mated queens become arrhythmic while they are laying, and recover it when laying is over. A queen in the middle of founding does not live by the clock: she lives for her brood.

Colour and size against the cold

Does an ant’s colour say anything about its climate? In 2016, Bishop and colleagues studied ant communities along 14 elevational transects in Africa, Australia and South America, and found a clear pattern: where it is colder, ants are, on average, larger and darker, and as temperature rises their colour becomes lighter. The authors interpret this as support for the thermal melanism hypothesis: a dark cuticle absorbs more radiation and a large body retains heat better. In the warmest places, communities became darker again where ultraviolet radiation was intense, because melanin also protects against it.

It is tempting to apply this to our ant, which is huge, dark and from high mountains, and it fits the pattern. But the study describes whole communities, not individual species, so we take it as an intriguing clue, not as a proven explanation.

Size and morphology

A huge, robust and highly polymorphic Camponotus, with minor workers and majors that can be told apart at a glance, and no sting.

• Colouring of our colonies. A dark, matt body, without the sheen or the golden pubescence of other African Camponotus, which gives it a solid, sober look.
• Majors. In our colonies there are majors of several sizes, and the largest are the last to appear. Some exceed 20 mm, with a huge head in relation to the body and broad, strong mandibles capable of cutting skin. They use them to defend the nest.
• Minors. A proportionally smaller head and long legs: these are the workers that go out foraging and the ones you will see moving around the foraging area.
• Queen. Huge, 23–26 mm in our colonies, with a broad thorax, which housed the muscles for the nuptial flight, and a large gaster, which holds the reserves she uses to found her colony.
• Profile. Seen from the side, the dorsum of the thorax traces the arch that gives the genus its name.
• Gaster. It ends in the acidopore, the small nozzle through which formicines spray formic acid. There is no sting.
• Development. The larvae spin a silk cocoon in which to pupate, as in all Camponotus; naked pupae are typical of Colobopsis, which was included in Camponotus until 2016.

Approximate sizes

• Queen: 23–26 mm (Antomas queens; no published measurements)
• Majors: some exceed 20 mm (Antomas colonies; no published measurements)
• Minor workers: no published measurements
• For reference, in other large African Camponotus: majors of about 15–17 mm (a major of C. brutus from Nigeria measured 15.4 mm) and a queen of 21 mm in C. langi (Wheeler, 1922)
• For reference outside Africa: majors of 16.8–19.6 mm and winged queens of 18.4–20.5 mm in C. singularis (Laciny and colleagues, 2016)

As it has not been described, there are no scientific measurements of the castes of “titanicus”: those of the queen and the majors are our own, taken from Antomas colonies. Compared with the published figures, they place it among the largest Camponotus known, and above every African species with measurements that we have found.

Care in captivity

Difficulty: 5/5 – Expert

A Camponotus is rarely a difficult ant, and this one eats everything and its queen founds alone. But at Antomas we consider it a species for experts, for four reasons you should be clear about before buying it:

• It does not like heat. In Antomas’s experience, it does best in a mild nest, not going above about 25 °C, which is just the opposite of many tropical exotics. A heating cable added “just in case” does it more harm than good, and the summer in much of southern Europe means you will have to find it a cool spot.
• A real diapause. It needs a marked winter rest, with a clear drop in temperature, and this has to be done properly every year (see “Diapause”).
• Its size and its bite. The majors exceed 20 mm and their bite cuts skin. You must always work with tools and with a set-up designed so that you never have to put your hands inside (see “Handling and safety”).
• Patience. In our experience, it grows at a moderate pace, the first workers are small and the majors take a long time to appear: at least two years, and longer still for the largest ones. When they do, they need large galleries and plenty of protein.

And it is well worth it. It is one of the largest Camponotus known, dark and robust, very rarely seen in the hobby, and a colony that grows slowly but becomes an imposing nest. If you have already kept several large Camponotus and are looking for the next one, it is a great choice. And if you have never had a large African species, Camponotus maculatus is a good first step: simpler, faster-growing and less sensitive to heat.

Recommended parameters

• Nest temperature: 21–25 °C in the active season. Never above 25 °C for long periods.
• Why these figures: our colonies come from high-mountain areas, with a cool, stable climate all year round (see “A giant from the African mountains”).
• Foraging area: at room temperature. If the room is cold, at most some gentle heat on one side, on a thermostat and never above 25 °C, so that the colony can choose.
• Humidity: tubes and humidity systems well filled with water at first; later, a gradient, with a humid area in the nest and the rest drier (see “Humidity: plenty at first, a gradient later”).
• Water: always available, in a test tube with water and cotton wool in the foraging area.
• Light: a dark nest, a lit foraging area and a normal day–night cycle.
• Diapause: marked, about 3 months at 12–15 °C (see “Diapause”).

Summer is the critical time. In many homes in southern Europe the thermometer stays above 25 °C for much of the summer. Choose the coolest room, out of direct sunlight, away from windows, appliances and radiators, and preferably on a low shelf rather than on top of a cupboard, where warm air builds up. Monitor the temperature with a thermometer next to the nest, rather than guessing. And never try to cool it with ice or with air conditioning blowing straight onto the formicarium: sudden changes and condensation are worse than a few degrees too many.

Humidity: plenty at first, a gradient later

Like almost all Camponotus, the queen and her first workers need humidity: the founding tube with its water reservoir behind the cotton wool and, once they move into the nest, the formicarium’s humidity systems well filled. A founding colony that dries out is a founding colony that is lost.

Once the colony has grown, at Antomas we recommend a gradient: one part of the nest slightly humid, where the colony usually keeps the smallest brood, and the rest drier, where the workers and cocoons gather. The colony chooses and moves according to what it needs. What you must avoid are the extremes: a soaking nest, with condensation on the walls, brings mould and mites; a completely dry one dehydrates the brood.

Recommended formicaria

For founding and the first few months, at Antomas we recommend an Anthouse Qbik Wild. They are made of plaster, hold moisture well and have a natural look, with chambers of a reasonable size for a young colony. To start with, the Qbik Wild One P 1C:

Qbik Wild One P 1C

When the colony grows and the majors appear, the natural next step is the Qbik Alpha range: modular formicaria, rather dry and much lighter, which can be expanded as the colony grows. Always with large galleries, because a major worker of this ant needs room to move about and to carry the brood. First, a QBIK ONE with large galleries:

QBIK ONE with large galleries

And to keep expanding, the QBIK DUO, also with large galleries. The size of the nest should always be in proportion to the colony: in a huge formicarium for a queen with just a few workers, the spare chambers end up as rubbish dumps and the nest is hard to keep humid and clean. Expand when you see lots of workers sitting still in the foraging area because there is no room inside. Complete the set-up like this:

• A spacious foraging area, with some sand, flat stones and a twig or piece of bark to climb on, with nothing reaching up to the barrier.
• Water in a test tube with cotton wool and a feeder for sugary liquids, never on cotton wool (see “Feeding”).
• A mineral-oil barrier and a well-fitting lid (see “Escapes and barriers”).
• A thermometer next to the nest: with this species, measuring the heat matters more than providing it.

Founding: queen with brood

At Antomas we sell it as a “Queen with brood”: a mated queen that has already started her colony in a test tube, with eggs, larvae or cocoons. As in the vast majority of Camponotus, founding is claustral: the queen seals herself in and raises her first workers on the reserves of her own body, without going out to eat. A large queen has plenty of fuel, but it is not unlimited.

• Tube, darkness and calm. Leave the tube just as it arrives, with its water reservoir, in a dark, quiet place free of vibrations, at 21–24 °C. You can cover it with a cloth or a piece of card.
• Water in the tube. Check from time to time that the cotton wool is still damp and that there is water left. If it runs out or the tube gets very dirty, move her into a new one by tipping, carefully.
• A snack now and then. Even though founding is claustral, at Antomas we recommend offering the queen something to eat occasionally, especially after the journey: a tiny drop of sugary liquid on a small piece of aluminium foil or a little piece of freshly killed insect. Never on the cotton wool in the tube, which goes mouldy. Remove anything left over the next day.
• No disturbance. A quick look once a week is enough. A stressed queen may eat her eggs.
• Patience. The first workers, the nanitics, are small: size increases with each generation, and the majors will not appear until at least two years have passed.

When should you move her into the formicarium? At Antomas we do it when there are about 5–10 workers, into a Qbik Wild One P 1C, or sooner if the tube becomes too small, gets dirty or runs out of water.

Arrival and moving by tipping

When you receive the queen, let her rest in a dark, quiet place, check that the tube has water, and do not move her to another tube or into the nest as soon as she arrives. When the time comes to move her, at Antomas we do it by tipping:

• Set up the formicarium beforehand, with the humidity systems filled, the oil barrier in place and the water where it belongs.
• Work over a tray, with a soft brush or soft forceps, never with your hands.
• Open the tube in the foraging area, next to the nest entrance, and gently tip out the queen, the workers and the brood, helping the stragglers along with the brush.
• Close the lid and leave the nest dark. Within a few hours they will have carried the brood inside.

To move them into a larger module later on, use the same method.

Feeding

Sugar in a feeder, always available. Like all Camponotus, it lives largely on sugary liquids: in the wild, nectar and honeydew from aphids and scale insects. Vary the sugars: at Antomas we recommend Anthouse’s Blue Sugar nectar 4–5 times a week and another nectar or sugary liquid 1–2 times a week. You can also add some protein to the nectar. Always offer it in a feeder, where the drop stays spread out and within reach, and never on cotton wool, which goes mouldy and spoils the liquid within a few days. Replace it before it ferments.

Protein: the more, the better. This is what makes the colony grow: the queen needs it to lay and the larvae need it to become workers, and an ant of this size needs a lot of it. If you carry out frequent maintenance and remove leftovers, it is better to give too much than too little: in our experience, the colony understands that it has resources and grows faster and in greater numbers. If you will not be able to clean often, it is better not to overfeed, because uneaten food rots and brings mould and mites. Change the type of insect from one week to the next, so that they do not always eat the same thing:

• Thermobia domestica: small, soft prey, perfect for the queen during founding and for the first workers.
• Crickets (Acheta domesticus) and mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), freshly killed or in pieces.
• Red runner roaches (Shelfordella lateralis) and dubia roaches (Blaptica dubia): chopped up for a young colony, and whole and freshly killed once there are majors.
• Termites, if you can get captive-bred ones: in Antomas’s experience, they take them very readily.

Remove leftovers within a day at most, and buy your insects from a reliable supplier: insects treated with insecticides can kill the colony.

Water: always, in the test tube with cotton wool in the foraging area.

Diapause

In Antomas’s experience, this line needs a marked winter rest, with a clear drop in temperature, and it benefits from it: it reaches spring in better shape and starts laying again with vigour. This fits with its origins: in its mountains there is no winter like ours, but the climate is cool all year round, and at home the rest does it a great deal of good. We have found no studies on diapause in this ant or in African Camponotus in general, so what follows is our own guideline:

• When and for how long: about 3 months, roughly from December to February.
• Temperature: 12–15 °C, and never below 10 °C.
• A gradual start: in November, lower the temperature little by little, over one or two weeks.
• During diapause: water always, a little sugary liquid, little or no protein and as little disturbance as possible.
• A gradual exit in March, until you are back at 21–25 °C, and protein as soon as you see activity and brood.
• Where: an unheated room, a garage, a cellar or a wine cooler, checking the temperature with a thermometer.

It is normal during those weeks for the queen to stop laying, for the brood to stay almost at a standstill and for the workers to hardly come out. That is exactly what should happen.

Behaviour and observation

Rhythm. Many large Camponotus become active mainly at dusk and at night. If yours is quiet at midday, that is normal: watch it at nightfall, when the minors go out to forage.

Growth. In our experience, moderate. The first workers are small and size increases with each generation. The majors appear quite late: after two years at the earliest, and there are several sizes of major, so the largest are the ones you have to wait for longest. With moderate warmth, plenty of protein and a good diapause, the colony picks up pace from the second year onwards.

Defence. Like other large Camponotus, it is a calm ant from day to day and does not go looking for a fight. If the nest is knocked or opened, the workers come out to defend it with their mandibles open and may spray formic acid, and the majors take up position in the front line, with mandibles that command respect.

Watch without fear. At Antomas we believe ants are there to be enjoyed, watched and learnt from, not kept hidden away. It is enough to leave them a dark area in the nest and a lit foraging area, and to watch them gently, intervening as little as possible. They get used to your presence.

Warning signs:

• Listless workers or brood that stalls in the height of summer: almost always, too much heat. Find a cooler spot.
• Larvae that do not grow outside diapause: not enough protein.
• Condensation on the walls or mould: too much humidity, or forgotten leftovers.
• A queen eating her eggs: too much disturbance.
• Lots of workers sitting still in the foraging area: time to expand.

Escapes and barriers

Camponotus climb glass and plastic well, and with an ant of this size an escape does not go unnoticed. At Antomas we use mineral oil:

• A thin, continuous band of mineral oil on the upper part of the walls of the foraging area. Renew it when it collects dust or debris.
• A well-fitting lid, as a second line of defence.
• No gaps at connections, plugs or tubes.
• Nothing that could act as a bridge: no twigs or stones leaning near the barrier.

Handling and safety

It does not sting: it has no sting. But it bites, and hard: in Antomas’s experience, a major of more than 20 mm that gets a good grip on the skin, with that massive head, cuts it and draws blood, and it can also spray formic acid, which smarts on the wound. It is nothing serious, but it is best avoided:

• Always with tools: a soft brush, soft forceps and, for transfers, tubes and adaptors. Never with your hands.
• Open the formicarium only as much as necessary, work slowly over a tray and close it when you have finished.
• Do not combine queens or different colonies, or keep it with other species.
• With small children at home, let them enjoy watching it with the formicarium closed, but never let them handle it.

It is an exotic species: it must never be released.

What not to do

• Keep it above 25 °C for long periods, or give it a heating cable without a thermostat.
• Leave it in a room that overheats in summer, in the sun or next to a radiator.
• Skip the diapause, or carry it out with sudden changes in temperature.
• Let the founding tube dry out, or soak the whole nest.
• Put a small colony into a huge formicarium, or use small galleries once the majors arrive.
• Put sugary liquids on cotton wool, or let them run out.
• Always give it the same insect, or leave leftovers uncleaned.
• Combine queens or different colonies.
• Handle it with your hands (a major can cut your skin), or neglect the barrier.

Scientific sources

“titanicus” has not been described, so there is no literature on the species. This care sheet is based on the scientific literature on the genus Camponotus, its relatives and giant ants, on the measurements of African Camponotus by Wheeler (1922, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 45) and in B. Taylor’s compilation The Ants of Africa, on Lévieux’s study (1982) of the diet of ants in the savannas of West Africa, and on the experience of Antomas. Main references:

1. Wilson, E. O. (1953). The origin and evolution of polymorphism in ants. The Quarterly Review of Biology 28: 136–156. doi:10.1086/399512
2. Feener, D. H. Jr. (1988). Effects of parasites on foraging and defense behavior of a termitophagous ant, Pheidole titanis Wheeler (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 22: 421–427. doi:10.1007/BF00294980
3. Leponce, M., Roisin, Y. & Pasteels, J. M. (1999). Community interactions between ants and arboreal-nesting termites in New Guinea coconut plantations. Insectes Sociaux 46: 126–130. doi:10.1007/s000400050122
4. Pfeiffer, M. & Linsenmair, K. E. (2000). Contributions to the life history of the Malaysian giant ant Camponotus gigas (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). Insectes Sociaux 47: 123–132. doi:10.1007/PL00001690
5. Sharma, V. K., Lone, S. R. & Goel, A. (2004). Clocks for sex: loss of circadian rhythms in ants after mating? Naturwissenschaften 91: 334–337. doi:10.1007/s00114-004-0526-8
6. Archibald, S. B., Johnson, K. R., Mathewes, R. W. & Greenwood, D. R. (2011). Intercontinental dispersal of giant thermophilic ants across the Arctic during early Eocene hyperthermals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278: 3679–3686. doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.0729
7. Yusuf, A. A., Crewe, R. M. & Pirk, C. W. W. (2014). Olfactory detection of prey by the termite-raiding ant Pachycondyla analis. Journal of Insect Science 14: 53. doi:10.1673/031.014.53
8. Laciny, A., Zettel, H. & Druzhinina, I. (2016). Workers, soldiers, and gynes: morphometric characterization and description of the female castes of Camponotus singularis (Smith, 1858) (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift 63: 183–193. doi:10.3897/dez.63.9435
9. LeBoeuf, A. C. et al. (2016). Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects. eLife 5: e20375. doi:10.7554/eLife.20375
10. Simola, D. F. et al. (2016). Epigenetic (re)programming of caste-specific behavior in the ant Camponotus floridanus. Science 351: aac6633. doi:10.1126/science.aac6633
11. Ward, P. S., Blaimer, B. B. & Fisher, B. L. (2016). A revised phylogenetic classification of the ant subfamily Formicinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), with resurrection of the genera Colobopsis and Dinomyrmex. Zootaxa 4072: 343–357. doi:10.11646/zootaxa.4072.3.4
12. Bishop, T. R. et al. (2016). Ant assemblages have darker and larger members in cold environments. Global Ecology and Biogeography 25: 1489–1499. doi:10.1111/geb.12516
13. Mildner, S. & Roces, F. (2017). Plasticity of daily behavioral rhythms in foragers and nurses of the ant Camponotus rufipes: influence of social context and feeding times. PLoS ONE 12: e0169244. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169244
14. Archibald, S. B., Mathewes, R. W. & Aase, A. (2023). Eocene giant ants, Arctic intercontinental dispersal, and hyperthermals revisited: discovery of fossil Titanomyrma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Formiciinae) in the cool uplands of British Columbia, Canada. The Canadian Entomologist 155: e6. doi:10.4039/tce.2022.49