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ANT WARS!

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argentine ants elimination

INVADING ANTS

As the summer fades as a warm distant memory into winter, there's war brewing in and around Auckland houses.

A war between two armies.  Armies of thousands versus thousands.  Their very survival is on the line. Its desperate times.

I am talking about the war that can happen at this time of year between two types of species of ants.

With dramatic effect. Customer calling ACES pest control in a panic as one army of ants retreats inside their home.

Normally these black ant live unseen and unnoticed in structure of a home. Suddenly customers call me saying they can see masses of smelly black ants in their hallway or around their kitchen or all over their house! Kgs of ants suddenly right in their home!

So what's chasing them inside?

Another ant species. A brown ant called the Argentine ant. Typically it surrounds the home. The Argentine is aggressive by nature and very high in  numbers. Its the end of summer their nest is at the peak of it size and suddenly with the onset of winter their exterior  food sources ( e.g. fruit and seeds) have dried up. So they find the trails of the black ant in your home and follow them looking for food.

The black ants can't stand the onslaught of these aggressive South American invaders. The black ants are surrounded, and there's only one way to go to escape. Inside your home! The black ant has a habit of in times of stress moving the entire nest. So not only do customers see kgs of ants they have never seen before, but they also bring all their white eggs and developing ants, which adds to general panic!

Hence the vigorous calls to ACES pest control.

For ACES its business as usual, when we take the pressure off the black ants by controlling the Argentine ants, its business as normal.

No more ants for the customers.

Hey it's what we do

written by Owen Stobart

ACES antpest control

COVID19 pest control as an essential service

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QUESTION: When is an essential service........ essential?

ANSWER: when there is a threat to safety and health pest control is an essential service

TVNZ seven sharp ask this very question and here's the story on youtube

 

So who is an essential worker?

Biggest essential workforces:

According to MBIE​ data the largest essential workforce is in healthcare and social assistance, with just under 250,000​ essential workers.

Of these workers, MBIE​ predicts that only 150,000​ workers will be working in their place of employment, with another 100,000 workers either working from home or unable to work.

The second-biggest essential industry was agriculture, forestry and fishing with 150,000 essential workers.

The third-largest number of essential workers was in manufacturing. Still, under alert level 4, only 70,000 workers would be able to work as usual, out of the 250,000 workers who are usually employed.

Essential workforces by region and ethnicity:

Southland has the largest percentage of essential workers, with more than 27 per cent of its workforce continuing to work in their place of employment under alert level 4.

Auckland, the region where the current cases have been located has the smallest amount of essential workers going to work of any region, with just under 15 per cent.

Wellington has the second-lowest level of essential workers operating from their place of employment at just over 15 per cent.

On a national scale, there are more males than females employed in essential services.

Despite this, more females will work from their workplace under level 4 lock down restrictions, than males.

More than 100,000 essential workers who work from their usual place of employment under alert level 4 are Maori or Pasifika

Health services, supermarkets, and pharmacies are three of 14 essential services that are allowed to have customers enter their premises.

Essential services allowed to have customers on the premises:

Only 14 types of essential services are allowed to have customers on their premises.

These are:

  • Supermarket, dairy or food bank
  • Pharmacy
  • Liquor store (in areas with a licensing trust)
  • Petrol station
  • Self-service laundry
  • Hardware store (for trade customers only)
  • Health service
  • Accommodation service
  • Court or tribunal
  • Social and community-based service to maintain critical wellbeing or crisis support
  • Emergency service
  • Parliamentary services
  • Passenger transport by road, rail, air or sea
  • School hostel.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern​ said on Wednesday masks must be worn by all customers entering the premises of essential services.

All essential workers in customer facing roles are also required to wear masks.

Customers and employees are expected to follow social distancing requirements, staying at least two metres apart from other people, sanitizing their hands, and using the Covid-19 tracer app.

Ardern clarified last year that butchers, bakers and greengrocers could do online delivery, after initial confusion.

Essential business types:
  • Accommodation services (including; hotels; boarding houses; campgrounds; backpackers; seasonal worker accommodation; tertiary student accommodation.)
  • Building, construction and maintenance services (only allowed to operate if the primary goal is to address immediate risks to health and safety, or are building nationally important infrastructure)
  • Education (required to provide distance or online learning for primary and secondary education.)
  • Foreign government (embassies, other entities maintaining critical operations at foreign missions based in New Zealand.)
  • Freight services
  • Government services (only if the service is a regulatory or social service, or relates to the Covid-19 response, or cannot reasonably be delayed.)
  • Health services
  • General practitioners (doctors)
  • Justice sector (Courts of New Zealand and Tribunals.)
  • Key utilities (business that supply the supply or disposal of either; electricity; gas; water; wastewater; waste; fuel; telecommunications)
  • Parliamentary services
  • Primary industries (food and beverage processing and production, and veteriinary services)
  • Retail stores (only via online orders for essential consumer products. They cannot allow customer to enter the premises.)
  • Scientific services
  • Security services
  • Social services
  • School hostels
  • Services for deceased persons
  • Supermarkets, dairies, petrol stations, pharmacies, food banks, self-service laundries
  • Transport and logistics
  • Food delivery services
  • Hardware stores (only open for trade customers working to help maintain other essential services)
  • Key communications (news, broadcast media and delivery of non-English language newspapers.)
  • Pest management
  • Businesses or services necessary to maintain other alert level 4 businesses
  • Pulp and paper plants
  • Residential care services

Businesses not included in this list who have been given license to operate by the government include; Tiwai Point aluminium smelter; Methanex; and NZ Steel.

If an essential service has employees working on site, the business owner should limit the number of people on site, so everyone can safely stay two metres apart , offer flexible working arrangements, for example, staggered meal breaks, or staggered start and finish times to help with physical distancing, clean and disinfect the workplace regularly , provide employees with handwashing facilities , have personal protective equipment (PPE) available for employees to use , encourage workers to wear a face covering if physical distancing is difficult and display a QR code and have an alternative contact tracing system available.

How to travel if you are an essential worker:

Essential workers are entitled to use public transport to commute.

However, travellers may be asked to show proof of employment at an essential service, to prove they have a reason to travel.

The government has recommended all employers provide employees with a letter to confirm who they are, and their role.

All travellers on public transport must legally must wear a face covering, including at departure points such as train stations and bus stops unless they have a medical exemption.

Essential workers are also permitted to travel within their region via private vehicle, taxi or ride-sharing app if it is to access their workplace or another essential service.

Ferries are open to essential movement only, or those returning home in the next 48 hours.

Sailings to Rangitoto, Tiritiri Matangi, Rotoroa and Coromandel are cancelled until further notice.

Post Graduate qualification in pest control

ACES pest control is now qualified certificate III Pro trains post graduate course in Timber pests.  

CPPPMT3008 Inspect for and report on timber pests

CPPPMT3010 Control timber pests

CPPPMT3042 Install physical termite management systems  

Owen Stobart graduated with this qualification on the 5th of July 2019  (document number S196/1738)  

Owen Stobart also has entry level qualification   CPPMT3005 Manage Pests without Pesticides CPPMT3006 Manage pests by applying pesticides CPPMT3018 Maintain equipement and pesticides storage area in pest management vehicles

Both Qualifications are recognised by the Australian Enviromental Pest Manager Association  and PMANZ ( Pest Managment Association of New Zealand) 

antspestcontrol

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While ants can be pests in Auckland, they are still amazing little creatures! ACES pest control is sometimes surprised at how resourceful ants are. This article shows another way that ants are amazing!

Ants don't tend to get in traffic jams. They might butt heads (or antennae) momentarily as they go about their industrious business, but ants somehow have mastered the art of keeping things moving. They're geniuses of flow.

Another striking thing about ants is that some of them just sit around doing nothing. This has also been noticed in other social insects, such as bees. When ants build a nest, some of them just sit around, inert, lazy, seemingly useless.

Now a study out of Georgia Tech, published Thursday in the journal Science, combines these observations to deliver a lesson that could have implications for such things as how the robots of the future might be used for disaster relief. The researchers found that ants are more successful when they are selectively industrious. They use idleness to their advantage. Quitting has its virtues.

The researchers studied groups of 30 color-coded fire ants digging tunnels in glass-walled containers in a laboratory. About 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the work. Some ants did very little or nothing. When the researchers removed the most hard-working ants, some of the previously less-active ants stepped up their game and began working harder. It appears that industriousness is not an individual attribute but a defined role. It's like a job title: heavy lifter.

When excavating a tunnel during the frenzy of nest-building, the tunnel face the deep end of the tunnel  can get crowded. That can cause traffic jams. What the researchers noted is that some ants turn around and leave the tunnel without doing any work. These reversals limit the potential for clogging up the works.

The team created computer models with simulated ants and found that this system of selective idleness enables the ants to dig deep faster. Their method reduces the chances of clogs. In effect, the ants have solved the eternal problem of too many cooks in the kitchen.

“What the ants have discovered is pretty close to the best way to do it. You need the idleness distribution and the appropriate amount of giving up, said Daniel Goldman, a Georgia Tech physicist who runs the lab and is the senior author of the new study.

“It’s a nice example of where doing less gives you more. And perhaps the most, said Ofer Feinerman, a physicist who studies ants at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and who was not involved in the new research. It seems the ants do the best that they could have done.

The Georgia Tech team built robots to try to simulate the ant behavior and couldn't quite match it, apparently because a robot is clunkier than a segmented, limber ant. But the robot work confirmed the basic idea that simple rules, such as knowing when to quit and let other individuals do the work, can benefit the overall project.

This kind of investigation could lead to improved designs for robot swarms. For example, multiple autonomous robots may need to enter buildings destroyed by earthquakes to look for survivors. Such efforts could benefit from simple strategies that involve labor inequality, the new paper states.

“If you wanted to have a system of diggers dig in a confined area, you don’t want to throw them all at the same tunnel. You want to have them selectively participate and not participate based on these physics-inspired rules, said Nick Gravish, a University of California at San Diego professor who studies ant biomechanics. Gravish earned his doctorate under Goldman at Georgia Tech but was not involved in the current study.

The principle of selective idleness could aid human teams working collectively on a document or a piece of computer code, said Simon Garnier, a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who studies collective behaviors in everything from slime mold to fish to mammals. "As long as all the agents in the system have a common collective goal, this principle might help them achieve it faster by reducing conflicts in accessing a common resource," Garnier said.

Fire ants are an invasive species common in the Deep South. They first arrived in the United States less than a century ago from the wetlands of South America.

They often live in low-lying, flood-prone areas. A fire ant colony functions like a superorganism. During a flood, the entire colony forms a raft, with the queen protected in the middle. This happened notably last year when Hurricane Harvey flooded the Southeast Texas coast.

The colony floats on the surface of the floodwater. When the ant-raft finally washes up somewhere, the ants build a nest rapidly. The workers (all female) can't leave the queen exposed.

No matter what kind of soil the ants dig in, they make their tunnels roughly the diameter of the length of an ant. That means their legs and antennae are always within reach of the tunnel wall, which assists the ants during moments of slippage. They can use their antennae as if they were auxiliary limbs.

Feinerman said researchers have noted that ants are sensitive to success and failure. When an individual ant tries to do something, such as obtain food or dig a tunnel, and is successful, she keeps doing it with extraordinary vigor and endurance. But when she fails, such as getting stymied while trying to enter a tunnel, she will quit and become inert. He said the new research suggests that relatively simple rules govern this behavior.

“There’s a positive feedback between how successful an ant is and her tendency to repeat the task, he said.

Gravish, who builds robots inspired by insects, said of ants: They’re far more complicated than robots. I wish we could get even close to the complexity of ants.

edited from Joel Achenbach original article https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/16/industrious-fire-ants-reveal-surprise-secret-to-success-selective-laziness/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c784206907dc

ACES antpest control

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"ACES | ants  pest control Auckland,  is aware that this ant has been  found in New Zealand, but is generally uncommon. Careful management of this species is required otherwise you can trigger their "budding" mechanisms where queens leave the nest with workers and set up multiple remote nest sites. This makes the problem much worse. If you see the "golden" Pharaoh ant best to call the Professionals straight away!" 

As its name suggests, the pharaoh ant views itself as a ruler among ants, a real headache for home and business owners.

As its name suggests, the pharaoh ant certainly views itself as a ruler among ants and they can be a real headache for home and business owners, and the pest management professionals that are tasked with eliminating them.

Unlike other ant species that are easily traced by following visible trails, pharaoh ants do not necessarily follow specific trails when they forage for food and harborage. Combine that with their preference to establish nests in hard-to-reach locations like wall voids, subfloors and attics, and the pharaoh ant is a worthy adversary.

Pharaoh ants are a problem in both commercial and residential accounts. While primarily a nuisance in residential accounts, they can present a health threat in food processing and healthcare facilities, hotels and grocery stores because they can carry and leave behind harmful bacteria (i.e. Salmonella, E. coli) on surfaces they come in contact with.

Pharaoh ants are drawn to commercial facilities because of the warm, humid conditions and abundant food and water sources that are often found inside within commercial kitchens and laundries.

There have been numerous documented cases where pharaoh ants have posed a major threat in healthcare facilities  hospitals, nursing homes and extended care facilities  where they have entered patient wounds and IV bags seeking moisture.

Pharaoh ant colonies are large in size with multiple nests and when they are displaced  sometimes the result of a pesticide application  members will venture off and establish new colonies in a process called budding.

In residential homes, pharaoh ants typically nest near the kitchen including voids under cabinets, behind baseboards and under floors. They also use electrical, cable and telephone wiring as a highway system to travel through walls and between floorboards.

Considering the challenges pharaoh ants present, what are the best methods for combatting them?

John Judge, training specialist for Environmental Pest Services in Tampa, Fla., which manages operations in three different Southern states, says a proper inspection and strategic bait placements are key elements of a pharaoh ant management program.  The pharaoh ant is not hard to identify but when it splits off during the budding process it can move rapidly and infest the other side of the structure from where you originally found it, says Judge. Because of its mobility a technician must look at the whole house rather than just his or her inspection in one area.

The proper use of inspection tools (i.e. flashlights, probing tools, etc.) and knowledge of construction practices (i.e. identifying connecting walls, location of electrical wiring, etc.) will also help the technician track the source of the infestation and how it got there.

Pharaoh ants found on the outside of the structure should be lured away by the strategic use of baits and repeated treatments may be required to completely eliminate this pesky invader.

Judge says the customer also plays an important part in preventing pharaoh ant by following good sanitation practices.

Keeping kitchens and food preparation areas clean of spilled food and removing excess moisture and clutter will make those areas less attractive to pharaoh ants, says Judge. As with most pest issues securing customer buy-in goes a long way.

A proactive approach to pharaoh ant management with customers understanding how basic maintenance tasks and adhering to good sanitation practices will help mitigate the problem.

The Pharaoh Ant Profile

  1. Pharaoh ants are very small workers  about a 1/16 of an inch in length
  2. Coloration ranges from yellow to light brown
  3. They do not swarm and colonies can number in the hundreds of thousands
  4. Pharaoh ants can nest indoors and outdoors
  5. Indoors they will infest hard-to-reach areas including wall voids, subfloors and attics
  6. Their preferred diet includes sugary foods (syrups, fruit juices, jellies) but they will also eat dead and live insects

FREE TIPS FOR CUSTOMERS

  • Seal all possible points of entry around the house including small openings and cracks around doors and windows
  • Keep counters and floors clean and free of crumbs
  • Store food in airtight containers and dispose of garbage regularly in sealed receptacles
  • Eliminate sources of standing water outside and use a dehumidifier indoors to prevent moisture buildup
  • Keep tree branches and shrubbery well-trimmed and away from the house
  • Store firewood at least 20 feet away from the house

adapted from PCT online

ACES antpest control

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ACES pest control using another technique when compared to this article. There are two ways of treating ants, repellent ( imagine a red STOP sign) which sets a barrier around the house. Effectively immediately as little ants are easy to kill. But always a temporary fix as it never gets to the Queen. This is the method described in this article. ACES uses the second method, NON repellent or TRANSFER ( imagine a Green GO sign).  The technique is slow and not very impressive initially, but is very harmful the nest and Queen (s). ACES uses 100% transfer products. We hope you enjoy Emilys article.

GREENVILLE, N.C.   What do you think of when a six legged, mighty, food scavenger comes to mind? Ants and lots of them.

You won’t notice them until they come home and they see hundreds of them on their countertops and their pantries and that kind of thing, said Peter Schonemann of Russ Pest Control. Then it’s a problem.

If you can get rid of them outside, then you won’ t have as many problems inside, Schonemann said.

Spending the past half hour trying to find an ant hill was difficult. It seemed the weather was just too hot.

If you get a lot of hot weather, it’s really dry they are looking for moisture,  said Schonemann.  And they end up sending out foragers looking for food. They find that crumb the kids left, or sugar you spilled when you made some coffee that kind of thing.

But there is one ant that is easier to spot than the others.

Fire ants are the most difficult ant to control, said Carl Little, Lowe’s garden employee.  Although three species are common in our area  argentine ants, odorous house ants, and fire ants  fire ants are the worst.

Fire ants are one of the biggest problems we have in eastern North Carolina, said Little.

The best way to take care of them is, pre-treat the best thing to always do is pre-treat in the early spring or summer with something like a broad pesticide or broad product with something like a slower release than wait ‘til you have the problem.

And when taking care of that ant hill in your backyard on your own, go for the pesticide that targets  the one that, kills the queen of the nest, and therefore eliminates the problem altogether.

adapted by ACES pest control from and article from By Emily Gibbs

for more information on  services offered by ACES pest control  for our services for rodents for services for ants  and for cockroaches 

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Man lets a bullet ant sting him on purpose and you’ll absolutely believe what happens next

ACES pest control have had their fare share of wasps stings, but that is rated 1 on a scale of 30. The bullet ant is rated the worse sting in the world for pain- that's number 30. So we can tell you this guy is 100% BONKERS

"About two months ago, we witnessed outdoor adventurer Coyote Peterson let a wasp known as a tarantula hawk sting him on his arm. Boasting the second most painful sting in the insect world, the tarantula hawk quickly had Peterson writhing on the ground in pain. And of course, it was all captured in a harrowing and altogether fascinating video.

Earlier this week, Coyote Peterson was at it again during an episode of Breaking Trail, this time taking things a bit further and letting himself get stung by a bullet ant, the insect widely believed to have the most painful sting in the world. The bullet ant typically inhabits rainforests in Central America, so odds are you don’t have to worry about coming into contact with one them. But if you’re sporting a name like Coyote Peterson, well, you pretty much have no choice but to seek out the bullet ant yourself.

According to the Schmidt Pain Index, the bullet ant, if I may repurpose some old Wu-Tang Clan lyrics, ain’t nothing to mess with. The resulting pain from a bullet ant sting is said to be extremely intense and feels like you’re “walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.” Interestingly enough, the reason why this fearsome insect is called a ‘bullet ant’ is because its sting is said to be as painful as a gunshot.

And for reasons that defy explanation, our fearless hero Coyote Peterson thought it might be a fun idea to get stung by one of these creatures on purpose. Naturally, it was all recorded on video for our collective enjoyment/horror."

the video is next door in our you tube section ====> worth a look

for more information on  services offered by ACES pest control  commercial pest control services for  rodents extermination  services and for cockroaches services

adapted from an article by Yoni Heisler

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Pest ants in Auckland are sometimes hard to control. Why? Because as this article says they are smart enough to farm. Which often means they come into your house the materials for this job! 

Please find below an article from IFLscience.com about smarts ants farming!


Humans only invented agriculture some 10,000 years ago, but ants have been doing it for millions of years. New analysis indicates that, although ants operate farms in many environments, true domestication occurred 30 million years ago, in desert or near-desert conditions.

Attine ant species form a symbiotic relationship with fungi. The six-legged farmers propagate the fungus, providing it with nutrients and protection from other animals that might consume it more recklessly. In return, they get to eat the fungal growth.

Like bakers’ apprentices taking precious starter dough to found their business, attine ants carry a small amount of fungus when they found a new colony. As with human agriculture, this has shaped the genetics of the species they farm, since varieties of fungus that best suit attine needs are more likely to be farmed.

Smithsonian Museum entomologist Dr Ted Schultz compared the DNA of 119 ant species, 78 of which are farmers. reporting his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. He mapped the timing of when species diverged, using fossils for confirmation, to locate those closest to the trunk of the ant farmers’ family tree.

The 250 known species of fungus-farming ants are divided into those that practice what is called “lower” and “higher” agriculture. Lower agriculture uses fungal species that can live without the ants’ protection. Sometimes the fungus will spread beyond the colony to grow in the wild, becoming a resource for the ants to draw on if their crops fail.

Higher agriculture involves fungi that, like many human crops, have been so modified by the farmers as to be unable to survive independently. Since the ants cannot survive without their fungi, the two species are locked in mutual dependence.

Lower agriculture has previously been estimated to have begun in South America 55-65 million years ago. Schultz’s work indicates higher agriculture dates back around 30 million years and began in a dry climate, contradicting previous assumptions of a wet origin.

Global climatic changes at the time dried much of South American out. Suitable ranges for rainforest fungi would have contracted, and Schultz thinks some were saved by ants that provided them with reliable moisture, collecting water for humidity-controlled fungal gardens.

“These higher agricultural-ant societies have been practicing sustainable, industrial-scale agriculture for millions of years,” Schultz said in a statement. “Studying their dynamics and how their relationships with their fungal partners have evolved may offer important lessons to inform our own challenges with our agricultural practices. Ants have established a form of agriculture that provides all the nourishment needed for their societies using a single crop that is resistant to disease, pests, and droughts at a scale and level of efficiency that rivals human agriculture.”

Given our own disastrous experience with monocultures, we’ve much to learn.


original articale by Stephen Luntz

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“ACES pest control sees how smart insects are, in particular ants on a daily basis. 

In fact Universities once pondered why an ant would slave and give its life for the colony or nest when they get nothing in return. The answer was to be found in looking at the nest as a single organism. This maybe why ants seem so smart, because its the collective thinking of the nest we are seeing…..here an article on just how smart ants are. “


“The brain of an ant is the size of a pinhead”

Ants are even more impressive at navigating than we thought.
Scientists say they can follow a compass route, regardless of the direction in which they are facing.
It is the equivalent of trying to find your way home while walking backwards or even spinning round and round.
Experiments suggest ants keep to the right path by plotting the Sun’s position in the sky which they combine with visual information about their surroundings.
“Our main finding is that ants can decouple their direction of travel from their body orientation,” said Dr Antoine Wystrach of the University of Edinburgh and CNRS in Paris.
“They can maintain a direction of travel, let’s say north, independently of their current body orientation.”
Ants stand out in the insect world because of their navigational ability.
Living in large colonies, they need to forage for food and carry it back to their nest.
This often requires dragging food long distances backwards.
Scientists say that despite its small size, the brain of ants is remarkably sophisticated.
“They construct a more sophisticated representation of direction than we envisaged and they can incorporate or integrate information from different modalities into that representation,” Dr Wystrach added.

“It is the transfer of information aspect which implies synergy between different brain areas.”
UK and French researchers came up with their findings by studying desert ants.
Experiments suggest the ants kept to the right path by following celestial cues. They set off in the wrong direction if a mirror was used to obscure the Sun.
If they were travelling backwards, dragging food back to their nest, they combined this information with visual cues. They stopped, dropped the food and took a quick peek at their route.
Scientists say the work could have applications in designing computer algorithms to guide robots.
Prof Barbara Webb of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics said the ant can navigate much like a self-driving car.
“Ants have a relatively tiny brain, less than the size of a pinhead,” she said.
“Yet they can navigate successfully under many difficult conditions, including going backwards.
“Understanding their behaviour gives us new insights into brain function and has inspired us to build robot systems that mimic their functions.”
She said they have been able to model the neural circuits in the ant’s brain.
The hope is to develop robots that can navigate in natural areas such as forests.

The research is published in the journal Current Biology.

By Helen Briggs

SMART ants | successful control Auckland

ACES customers often remark that ants seem really smart. They will mention that no matter what they do they seem be out smarted by these little pests. 

Here is an article by Kata, which seems to suggest ants are smarter than we think.

SMART ANTS- crafting tiny sponges as tools. 

Ants may be smarter than we give them credit for. Tool use is seen as something brainy primates and birds do, but even the humble ant can choose the right tool for the job.

István Maák at the University of Szeged in Hungary and his team offered two species of funnel ants liquids containing water and honey along with a range of tools that might help them carry this food to their nests.

The ants experimented with the tools and chose those that were easiest to handle and could soak up plenty of liquid, such as bits of sponge or paper, despite them not being found in the insects’ natural environment.

This suggests that ants can take into account the properties of both the tool and the liquid they are transporting. It also indicates they can learn to use new tools  even without big brains.

Some ant species are known to use tools, such as mud or sand grains, to collect and transport liquid to their nests. But this is the first time they are shown to select the most suitable ones, says team member Patrizia d’Ettorre from the University of Paris-North, France.

Tool up

To investigate this behaviour, the team offered Aphaenogaster subterranea and A. senilis ants various possible tools, both natural, such as twigs, pine needles and soil grains, and artificial.

The ants experimented with the tools and eventually showed preference for certain tools  even unfamiliar ones. The ants would drop the tool into the liquid, pick it up and then carry it to the workers back in the nest to drink from.

Subterranea workers preferred small soil grains to transfer diluted honey, and sponge for pure honey. Most of them even tore the sponge into smaller bits, presumably for better handling.

Senilis started off using all the tools equally, but then focused on pieces of paper and sponge, which could soak up most of the diluted honey they were offered. This indicates that they can learn as they go along.

Factors such as the weight of the tools could also have influenced the ants’ choice, but the researchers believe the tools’ absorbency and ease of handling mattered the most.

Stuck for space

Aphaenogaster ants possibly developed such tool use because, unlike many other ants, they can’t expand their stomach, says d’Ettorre. They had to find a way to exploit the valuable resource of liquid food.

This way, when ants come across a fallen fruit or a dead insect in the wild, their fluids can be transferred to the nest for the rest of the colony.

As ants live in a highly competitive environment, natural selection may favour using such tools to help feed the colony, says Valerie S. Banschbach at Roanoke College, Virginia.

And these ants may have been happy to try novel materials because which particular tools are available in their natural habitat varies according to the season.

Many other accomplishments of these small-brained creatures rival those of humans or even surpass them, such as farming fungi species or using ‘dead reckoning’, a sophisticated navigation to find their way back to the nest,” says Banschbach. “The size of brain needed for specific cognitive tasks is not clear.”

Tool use in insects is largely genetically controlled and evolved from selection of advantageous genetic mutations, says Gavin R. Hunt at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. This is unlike most tool use in birds or primates, which begins as novel behaviour and can sometimes be enhanced through genetic changes, he says.

By Kata Karáth

ACES experience is that ants do remarkable things too.  We always tailor our treatments for your type or species of ant in your home! Which explains why our customers are very happy with our results on www.nocowboys.co.nz with a rating of  97% with more than 190 reviews