Ants, Join the hive mind Options

[Chimp with a Lim...]

We've gotten a lot of ants in and around the house recently, which has been a pain sometimes. Usually its just a random ant or two, but there has been times that I've opened the dishwasher and the plates were crawling with ants. So, much like Bill Murray in Caddyshack, I decided to wage war with my little enemy.

A good rule of warfare is to know your enemy. I made it a point to know ants better then they know themselves. I have the luxury of being hundreds of thousands of times bigger then them so I was able to witness their comings and goings on my garden path from a high vantage point - much like observing them using a spy satellite or the popular Google Earth software package. Why did my reconaissance teach me? Plenty. Ants walk in virtually straight lines, like sheep ready for herding. They also seem to have 'lanes' so the ants don't keep smashing headfirst into each other. They walk at a medium pace (for an ant) and this facilitated my experimentation. Oh no, I'm not proud of my work, but it was a necessity. These insectoid invaders needed their come-uppance.

Note that I am usually very karma-aware and will go as far as to revolt myself by carrying spiders and bugs out of the house. Regarding the ants, I first selected at random a single ant to kill. I chose one that was in the throng, walking in the lane moving away from the house. As soon as it was killed, the others went berserk - even ones nowhere near the fallen drone. They all doubled their pace, broke ranks and ran everywhere. How deliciously interesting. I took note.

The next test I made was to obstruct the path of the walking ants, once they had regained their order. I placed a small stone in their way. Basically, the ants seemed to get confused for a moment, then at random walked around the stone until they continued on their path. What was fascinating was that eventually, the ants didn't even notice there was an obstruction and they started walking around the stone without slowing down. They seemed to find the quickest way around and all proceeding ants took that route. Curious.

Next, I decided to see how they would react to stimuli. I clapped loudly above them (noise), reflected the overcast sun on them (heat and light) but nothing seemed to affect them at all. I placed some food in their path (some sugar to be precise), but strangely for the time I was watching they didn't really react to that either. Perhaps they were busy with other instructions.

The ants gave away no more information through observation, so I took to the internet to learn from the great scholars. Here's some of the mindblowing stuff I've learned about ants fom the wikipedia.

• Ants are eusocial, an evolutionary trait which means they reproductively specialise. Each ant is born with a role (worker, soldier, drone etc). Most people are aware of that but the wiki topic on eusociality is fascinating in itself. As a theory, it goes against evolution because non-reproductive ants should have been driven out of the gene pool.
• When all their individual contributions are added up, they may constitute up to 15 to 25% of the total terrestrial animal biomass. Meaning that possibly a quarter of all animal life, by weight, is comprised of ants.
• 120-170 million years old.
• Ants communicate through pheremones, which they can 'smell' via their antennae. As they have two, they can smell the direction also. When an ant finds food, it walks back to the nest, using the sun as a guide, in as close to a straight line as possible. It leaves a trail of pheremones as it does. the next ant to leave the nest will more likely follow that trail, and leave a trail itself when the food is found. In this way, the ants discover the most efficient way to and from the food, and hence walk in the straight lanes that I observed. An ants pheremones can communicate all at once its role (forager, soldier), current task, state of health and nutrition and so on.
• Ants nests are regarded as a single superorganism, due to the fact that the individual ants all work towards a single common goal and will happily sacrifice themselves for the common good. Ants are one of the only non-primate species that will actively teach other members how to do tasks.

After this study I was sure I knew the ants rather well. I decided to think about the best way to get rid of them. I knew that if I blocked up their paths, they'd quickly find another way to go so that option was out. I knew that if I killed the ants I could see, the others would survive and rebuild so that option was out. I needed to take out the head honcho - the queen. Now, I've seen aliens and I know how nasty this thing could be, so I decided to use the ants own instincts against them. I researched different ways to make the ants kill their own queen, when eventually it hit me. If I find a kind of poison that appeared to be regular delicious food, that would mean the ants would take it back home and feed it around to everyone. Perfect!

After a little research I found that rentokill have a line of jelly-food like this that would do the job, and I found some in a supermarket. I layed a few traps. Basically, they were bottle caps full of this jelly, in places I knew the ants frequented. Jesus, this stuff was like crack for them. Within a few minutes it seemed that every single ant in the area was sprinting straight to and from the traps and carrying off fragments back to the home base. Huge amounts of ants were gathering, to the point that I shuddered with revulsion and started to feel them crawling all over me - even though they weren't.

That was two days ago. I checked yesterday and the ants seem less interested in the traps but are going bananas sprinting about in circles with no real order any more. I've found a lot of dead or slow ants in the house too. I'll write anything else interesting that I find here.

Check out this good java-based ant simulator (click to drop food)
Also, read about bullet ants, the bug with the most painful sting, which has been likened to being shot.

[Ploppin' Fresh]

You went about it all wrong I'm afraid. Have you not seen 'A Bug's Life'? You should have made them gather food for you for a few years, waited until they decided to revolt, and then used the trap. Less work, more money... the benefits are endless.

This post has been edited by Ploppin' Fresh: Oct 18 2007, 06:40 PM

[Al.]

Just wait till the buggers decide to swarm. Ive come back to find our hallway a buzz with hundreds of horny winged ants before. Eusocialism doesnt really go against evolution it was just Darwin didnt really understand the mechanism of evolution (DNA) and didnt realise that insects are inbred hicks* and on a genetic level the survival of the colony is the equivalent of survival of the fitest in other animals.



*Fun fact Darwin married his Cousin and had 10 children.

[sawall]

When I lived in Los Angeles, I was in a couple places that had massive ant problems. I, too, am squeamish about squishing insects and arachnids - I make an effort to escort them outside rather than kill them. But ants feel like a total home invasion, which triggered an entirely different response in me.

I found some detergents that killed them and confused their scent trails. This worked for a while. The traps also worked as a temporary measure, but it didn't work in the long run. I suspect there may have been multiple hives in the area, so the traps would impact one but not all of them.

Before I was able to get rid of them, I got very, very angry at them. I spotted a little spider-web in the corner of my unused (except for the litter box) guest bathroom. There was a small house spider living in it. I started picking up ants that irritated me and would drop them off in the web. I made that spider very happy over the weeks to come.

In the end what I had to do was leave some food out for them, and the proactively caulk in the cabinets and other cracks where they snuck in. Every time they found a new way in (which was often), I'd caulk that. After a couple weeks, I had finally either closed up all the gaps, or they got sick of trying to get into my place and started invading the next door neighbors' flat instead. The ant invasion was over, and I would occasionally catch one outside to bring in for the spider.

This post has been edited by sawall: Oct 19 2007, 12:00 PM

[Laintal]

Hopefully the Ant Invasion is over.

You usually dont get too many Ant problems in Wellington.

Cheers Laintal

[Akire]

When I bought my house in June, I found many of the little buggers in my livingroom and downstairs bathroom. Red ones in the livingroom, and black ones in the bathroom. I tried two different kinds of poison traps before the populace started to decline. The idea of caulking would probably take all my life for months with the extent of possible openings--so a friend told me to put a ring of anti-ant around the whole house. Apparently that works. They have pretty much stopped here, due to the cold, so I'll think about that sort of venture for next summer. As summer must just be sneaking up on you in NZ, perhaps it would be a thing to consider.

[Al.]

Obviously you should have told the red ants that the black ants were slagging their queen and vice versa.

[Chimp with a Lim...]

Update: No ants outside any more!
Update: Ants are now inside.

Thats only a half truth really. There are no more trails of ants walking anywhere so I assume they're confused, dying or dead. I've noticed one particular windowsill in the house seems to have ants on it - ten or twenty at a time - so I'm keeping an eye on that. Most of them are dead so perhaps they're coming to that sill to die. I've also noticed worker ants carrying around the dead.. cleaning up if you like. Fascinating to watch.

[Chimp with a Lim...]

Those almighty fools have taken the bait! Haw! Watch in sheer terror as the ants snack and feast on the green ooze, carrying quivering lumps of it back to their masters!



Please ignore the sound effects in the background. I was angle-grinding while taking a leak

[Chimp with a Lim...]

Just wait till the buggers decide to swarm. Ive come back to find our hallway a buzz with hundreds of horny winged ants before.

I've also noticed worker ants carrying around the dead.. cleaning up if you like. Fascinating to watch.

Strangely enough, Al's prediction came true about a month ago, as the window that previously had plain ants suddenly was swarmed with weird flying ants. One time I came home and the window had hundreds on it. I sprayed them with Windowlene and wiped up their bodies.

On a different note, the bathroom windowsill was regularly populated with chopped up dead ants so I set myself a guard and watched and waited. As i thought, other worker ants were randomly walking in through a tiny hole at the top and dropping the snipped up ants in their ant graveyard, which happened to be my windowsill. I blocked up the hole and hey presto, no more ant bodies. For some reason their actions reminded me of dwarf fortress. In fact, being an ant queen must be very like playing that game.

In general, the ants are a non-problem any more after laying the poison. I know it certainly didnt kill them entirely as I still sometimes see trails in random places, but luckily they're all in the garden, nowhere near the house. For now we have a strained ceasefire.


Now, as for the huge New Zealand slugs we've been getting in the house...

[Chimp with a Lim...]

This is wild. Part of a Planet Earth documentary that shows Ants being infected by a spore, which forces them to climb upwards and then eventually bite into something to anchor themselves. They then die and a fungus pierces out through their head which erupts, spreading more spores. Apparently if an ant shows signs of this, the other ants will grab it and bring it as far away as possible. Horror film stuff.

[Chimp with a Lim...]

The Smithsonian has a good collection of ant photgraphs at the moment. i particluarly liked the one showing the ants herding aphids for their own purposes, picking them up and dropping them where needed.

[Chimp with a Lim...]

In an ironic turn of events, my accepted nickname in New Zealand for about 90% of people is "Ants".