The Ant Man (including "Slave-Making Ant")

[Guest]

I want ants that will take out my trash. (I hope SSSarahh sees this.) - Perdita

Got Ants? Entomologist revels in studying the critters' fascinating ways - Sam Whiting, SF Chron, October 10, 2004

The high point of "Ants: Hidden Worlds Revealed" was the night the homeless Howard Street ants broke through the door, scaled a 6-foot glass wall into the Army Ant arena and were found eating their food in the morning. To hear the story, hang around the California Academy of Sciences and look for an antlike man feeding live crickets to his beloved Army. This is staff entomologist Brian Fisher, 39.

Why ants? If you put all the ants in a big pile and put humans in another big pile and weighed them, they'd weigh about the same. Ants are the only thing that compete with humans in terms of dominating the earth.

How? They are the No. 1 feared predator.

What made you decide to devote your life to ants? I grew up in a cornfield in Iowa and had this feeling that the exciting things were either in the mountains or in the tropics. I decided to be a tropical biologist and was down in Panama with the Smithsonian collecting plants.

How did that lead to ants? Everywhere I went I was encountering ants, and nobody could tell me what genus they were. Nobody was the expert on ants, so I switched to ants and did a Ph.D. at UC Davis. I discovered 800 new species of ants in Madagascar.

How do you find new species? I invented the first method for inventorying ants in a tropical environment. With that tool, I was able to find the ants in a habitat that nobody could get to before.

What's the point? The greatest adventure left on earth is the discovery of every living thing. My hands were trembling the first time I came back from Madagascar and looked in a petri dish, and there were two undescribed ant genera. To me, nothing can compete with that excitement.

What's the most interesting local ant? Right here in the liberal, Democratic Bay Area, there's an ant that enslaves another species. It's called Slave-Making Ant.

What about common household ants? In the Bay Area, it's the invasive Argentine Ant that's the problem. They've formed a super-colony from Oregon to San Diego. Seventy percent of all calls to pest control agencies are because of this ant.

What can pest control do? They spray the house. These chemicals do nothing. No matter how many times you kill one queen, there are always 12 other queens or 100,000 workers that will come back in.

What makes ants come inside? The reason the ants invade a house is all climate-driven. When it's too hot or too wet outside, the ants go inside the house, and when the weather switches they go back outside.

What do they want from us? Sugar and liquids.

How do they communicate? They have these glands that produce 20 different chemicals that indicate different things. That's why humans find ants so fascinating.

Fascinating? They have a division of labor like we do. They have ants that are nurses, they have ants that take out the trash. They have a cemetery. They have to organize individuals to accomplish a task.

How much can an ant carry? Up to 50 times their own weight. I was camping once in Panama, and I set down a bag of rice. The next morning, there was not a grain left. They'd come in during the night and carried it off one by one, 50 pounds of rice.

So, ants are always on your mind? Day and night. I'm trying to get other people to get them on their minds. That's why I've developed antweb.org. We have vivid images of every species of ant in California.

Do you have ants? There are 16 species that live around my house and another 50 species in my neighborhood.

Who do you live with? I live alone. I'm just an ant man. pic

 

[R. Richard]

"What can pest control do? They spray the house. These chemicals do nothing. No matter how many times you kill one queen, there are always 12 other queens or 100,000 workers that will come back in."

I used to live in the South. Down there they have an ant, known as the fire ant. If a fire ant bites a human the wound itches and burns and then infects when the human scratches it.

There is one and only one workable cure for the fire ant (and ants in general). For the fire ant the specific is called Amdro (brand name, although there are several generic amdros). The human scatters Amdro around a fire ant hill. The ants perceive the Amdro as food. They carry the Amdro down into their ant colony and store it for the winter. They also begin to eat some of the Amdro. Amdro is a slow poison for the fire ant. After a time, fire ants begin to die. The ants are not smart enough to connect the deaths with the Amdro. After a time, an entire fire ant colony will die if enough Amdro is supplied.

You cannot chase down and kill ants. You have to outsmart them.

JMHO.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

My God, they are so organized. Maybe we can learn something from them!!
Cool article P.

 

[cloudy]

Fire ants are insidious! I deal with them in the yard every day. Not only do they hurt when they bite, they will also swarm up your leg if you happen to be unwary enough to step on a nest, and can cause life-threatening alllergic reactions. A co-worker of mine almost died several years ago.

While I can't help but be amazed at the things they do, I wish they would do them somewhere else. It's very hard to keep an eye on a small one out in the yard with new nests cropping up every day.

 

[R. Richard]

Fire ants are insidious! I deal with them in the yard every day. Not only do they hurt when they bite, they will also swarm up your leg if you happen to be unwary enough to step on a nest, and can cause life-threatening alllergic reactions. A co-worker of mine almost died several years ago.

While I can't help but be amazed at the things they do, I wish they would do them somewhere else. It's very hard to keep an eye on a small one out in the yard with new nests cropping up every day.

Cloudy:
I had fire ants when I moved into my home in the South. The Amdro knocked down all of the nests within a week. Then, I had new nests pop up where they came over from the neighbors. It took a little salemanship, but within a few months everybody used Amdro (mostly cheaper clone stuff) and we had almost no fire ants in the neighborhood.

We even developed our own neighborhood version of the welcome wagon when a new neighbor would buy and move in. "Hi new neighbor. This is Amdro. You will use it on any fire ant nests you see. Everyone in the neighborhood uses it."

 

[cloudy]

Cloudy:
I had fire ants when I moved into my home in the South. The Amdro knocked down all of the nests within a week. Then, I had new nests pop up where they came over from the neighbors. It took a little salemanship, but within a few months everybody used Amdro (mostly cheaper clone stuff) and we had almost no fire ants in the neighborhood.

We even developed our own neighborhood version of the welcome wagon when a new neighbor would buy and move in. "Hi new neighbor. This is Amdro. You will use it on any fire ant nests you see. Everyone in the neighborhood uses it."

I don't have a "yard." I have acres, and acres. Can't keep them down on that much land, not realistically.

 

[rgraham666]

I believe fire ants are actually a species of wingless wasp.

But for sheer meanness, the bulldog ants of Australia win hands down. As I recall, they are an inch long with half inch jaws and quarter inch stingers. They're rather primitive as ants go, just the queen and all the others. No castes of warriors and workers. And the colonies are rather small, maybe a couple of hundred ants total.

They're highly territorial. If a bulldog ant colony moves into your house, one of you has got to go. No modus vivendi here.

Any Aussies here who can correct my mistakes?

But compared to termites, ants are a bit dull. There is a species of termite that blows itself up to defend the nest. And various species have developed all kind of chemical weapons.

 

[Guest]

There is a species of termite that blows itself up to defend the nest. And various species have developed all kind of chemical weapons.

We're doomed then. Terrorist termites.

Perdita

 

[R. Richard]

In South America they have something called army ants. They live in giant colonies of hundreds of thousands of ants. The colonies are constantly on the move to find food. The ants devour everything edible in their path. They can strip a cow to skeleton in a few hours. Not nice.

JMHO.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I'm really starting to hate ants this year (not fear as I'm a borderline entomolophile and a confirmed arachnophile).

It's because I have a near-ground apartment room which has a tendency to get unforgivably stuffy if the window is open and tends to lure very scary floormates if the door is open. However, an open window seems to make my room a target for every single scouting ant and since my bed is by the window, this means that their pathway is over my sleeping body. Overall, not a very happy thing to wake up to. Oh well, that's why God made Raid.