Laboratory studies on insects face the dual challenge of maintaining organisms under artificial conditions, and in reduced spaces while mimicking the species’ ecological requirements as much as possible. Over decades, myrmecologists have developed and continuously improved laboratory methods and artificial nests for rearing ants. However, the setups commonly used to house colony fragments of few individuals or even isolated individuals present disadvantages such as insufficient ventilation, difficult access to specific workers, and problems with water delivery. Here, we developed and tested a new setup for keeping ants or similar sized insects in small groups. The setup consisted of a Petri dish containing a piece of plaster connected underneath to a water tank by a sponge. The sponge is immersed in the water on one side and embedded in the plaster on the other side, maintaining the plaster permanently moist and thus offering a water source to the ants. We tested the setup with two ant species of different sizes, Platythyrea punctata and Cardiocondyla obscurior in feeding, starvation, and desiccation conditions. Our results showed that our new setup worked equally well for both species in all conditions in comparison to a more conventional setup with the advantage of reducing maintenance costs and ant manipulation, but also preventing death by drowning and offering water ad libitum. The setup was quick to build, with cheap and reusable materials for further experiments. Therefore, we are confident that it will facilitate future studies on isolated or small groups of individuals and that such a standardized setup will make future studies more comparable.

对昆虫的实验室研究面临着双重挑战，即在人工条件下和缩小的空间内维持生物体，同时尽可能地模仿物种的生态要求。几十年来，蚂蚁生态学家开发并不断改进实验室方法和饲养蚂蚁的人工巢穴。然而，通常用于容纳少数个体甚至孤立个体的群体碎片的设施存在一些缺点，例如通风不足、难以接近特定工人以及供水问题。在这里，我们开发并测试了一种将蚂蚁或类似大小的昆虫分成小群的新装置。该装置包括一个培养皿，里面有一块石膏，下面通过海绵连接到水箱。海绵的一侧浸入水中，另一侧嵌入石膏中，使石膏保持永久湿润，从而为蚂蚁提供水源。我们用两种不同大小的蚂蚁（Platythyrea punctata和Cardiocondyla obscuror）在进食、饥饿和干燥条件下测试了该设置。我们的结果表明，与更传统的设置相比，我们的新设置在所有条件下对这两种物种都同样有效，其优点是减少维护成本和蚂蚁操纵，而且还可以防止溺水和随意提供水而死亡。该装置搭建起来很快，使用廉价且可重复使用的材料进行进一步的实验。因此，我们相信它将促进未来对孤立或小群体个体的研究，并且这种标准化设置将使未来的研究更具可比性。