ANTS

Day 159 of the Lower Puna Eruption, and still no official word about the end.

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My blog yesterday (scroll down to the next posting) indicated that ants were smarter than cats.  A neighbor took offense and said her cats were smarter than any ant.  Well, Forbes indicated that ant colonies rival the human equivalent.  

There must be something special about ants because they have been around for a very long time.  Dinosaurs came perhaps 250 million years ago, but ants not long thereafter.  While dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years, ants survived and now number 10 quadrillion (that's 10,000,000 billion--there are around 7.5 billion of us).  While we take pride in developing farms 10,000 years ago, ants came up with agriculture 60 million years ago.  Ants even practice slavery.

How much can you carry?  Not much for me, and this is debatable, but ants apparently can carry up to 10,000 times their weight...1000 for sure.  They can tolerate exposure in a microwave oven.

Queens are very special.  They can live up to thirty years, while the average for workers, who are female, is from one to three years.  Males?  Maybe only weeks.  The driver ant queen can be two inches long and lay a million eggs in weeks.

We have one specie of Homo sapiens.  Ants have up to 22,000.

But how smart are they?

• can navigate long distances, using smells, the sun, polarized light patterns, magnetism, wind direction, etc.
• have a sense of time
• care for their family (colony)
• are altruistic
• cooperate in a rigid social order
• apply multiple antibiotics in their farming of fungus, plus provide soil aeration and nitrogen, while dispersing seeds
• use pheromones for communication, and there are 400 distinct smell receptors
• coat themselves with 40-50 odors for identification, but only queens use nonacosene, a sign of fertility
• have clinics for illnesses, but the seriously ill leave the nest to die

I've had major battles with ants all my adult life.  More recently, ants have a way of crawling into my sweaty clothing on a golf course and biting me, causing welts that last for weeks.

Here at 15 Craigside, they have killed off my citrus and just about everything I plant.  They tend aphids and other mini-creatures like we do a herd of cattle.  I've seen my ants build bridges to get around my moats:

Terro seems to work relatively well, but some are still around, and sometimes build a home under this trap.  This is simply a way to charge you more for borax, the active ingredient.

I was sent a note that Nutrasweet (used in Diet Coke/Pepsi), which is aspartame, works, too, if not better and safer.  While this compound is popularly known to have been developed to kill ants, the truth is that it was first synthesized as an anti-ulcer drug, but was found to have a sweet taste, so  G.D. Searle marketed it as an artificial sweetener in the late 1960's.  Snopes goes on to further state that there is no evidence that aspartame kills ants.

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There are six ocean storms:

Hurricane Michael is set to make landfall at Category 3 strength over the the Panhandle within 24 hours:

The Carolinas will again get a lot of moisture.

In the Atlantic, Hurricane Leslie will not threaten Europe.  The latest projection is a right turn towards Africa, where most of these storms start.

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