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ANT WARS!

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

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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