Lately we've seen a new phenomenon around our house - suicidal ants. The picture above shows a spoon that I had used to put margarine into our popcorn popper and then inadvertantly left the spoon on the counter. The next morning it was covered with ants as shown by this picture. Note that most of the ants are actually immersed in the margarine. They have suffocated or gotten stuck to the point that they're not going anywhere.
Now look at this picture. It was taken a couple of days before the other one. I had been making "nectar" for our hummingbird feeder and had left a couple of large drops of sugar water on the stove top. Sure enough, after several hours there was a group of ants surrounding the drops. But rather than taking the food back to their nest, they appeared to be gorging themselves to death. What you see in this picture are ants surrounding a now-extinct drop of sugar water (make that two drops that had touch and therefore merged into one like a figure eight.)In both situations we looked for a path back to the nest with ants coming and going, transporting food from the stove area to their nest wherever it is. But there didn't seem to be a significant trail.With ant killer now that lets the ants take the poison back to their nest before they die, maybe we're developing ants that are immune to such tactics.
I find your post particularly interesting because we've had an incursion of these same tiny ants (as pictured above) some time yesterday. I had put a few drops of ant bait on some pieces of foil and offered it to them in different locations. Most seemed immediately uninterested (which is different from my usual observation), but having checked this morning, I found about a dozen of them dead, either completely immersed in the liquid or lying alongside the droplets.
ReplyDeleteI realize that ants are considered to possess a kind of intelligence, but it's strange to think that they have somehow adapted to the poison bait, seeing that their instinct would require them to ferry food back to the colony and share it, thereby killing any ants that might survive with the knowledge to avoid this tactic in future. Also, it still wouldn't explain why they choose to drown or gorge themselves to death...