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Invasion of Invincible Ants
Kryptonomic writes: "It's coming to Australia. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, pain or fear! No. It's not a Godzilla or the Alien. It's an ant that attacks anything in its path is slowly spreading though Queensland, Australia, sparking fears of crop damage and environmental destruction."
but theyre more like little locusts or something . ..
They apparently eat alot of crops and might attack animals. Its not like they'd start eating your house like termites. This sounds like the perfect place to start using some genetically engineered crops to poison the ants.
Hopefully, if the problem gets big enough and a succesful genetically engineered crop can be produced without people freaking out, it will help spur the acceptance of genetically engineered foods.
California is suffering a similar invasion of the Argentine ant. These guys don't sting, so they're not as bad as the fire ant.
However, they do have some interesting features which is allowing them to wipe out native ants and completely dominate the CA landscape:
1) Many queens per colony. In any ant vs. ant battle, the Argentine ant can usually bring far greater numbers to bear, and tiny as they are, they win.
2) Tolerance. Apparently, only one colony of Argentine ants made it into the USA, in the beginning. All the daughter colonies are so similar genetically one US colony of these ants
doesn't recognize another as an enemy. So every
colony of Argentine ants in the US is the friend of every other colony. Or, you could say that ALL the Argentine ants in the US form a single supercolony.
Fire ants are apparently similar in this respect, so there's a big supercolony of fire ants in the southeast US, and a big supercolony of Argentine ants in the West. Will one or the other supercolony come to dominate North America, or will they eventually form a stable frontier?
Geez, the article would have you believe that these things are going to take over everything. I've had to deal with fire ants for my entire life (they everywhere here in Texas -- hell, I think there are some running around on my carpet right now).
While they are annoying and impossible to get rid of, nobody should really fear them. The only way they will cause death is after something has been swarmed and stung by *1000's* of them, usually after falling on top of the large mounds they create. It's really more of an annoyance to get stung than anything.
I think it is prudent for Australia to stop them from spreading before it's too late (which all efforts here have shown to be damned near impossible), but really people, there is no reason to panic over the situation (as the article may make you believe.)
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
Tell me about it. I nearly shat myself with surprise when I laid out some bait, saw it getting mobbed with hundreds of ants, including a queen. I remember asking myself "WTF's the queen doing out here where she could get crushed?"
Then I did some research, and I'm glad I didn't kill the queen on sight - presumably she took the bait back to the rest of the nest, or it was a small nest with only one or two queens, because I never saw another ant in the building again.
But yeah, that was weird, seeing the queen showing up for dinner.
I think you're probably right: eventually this monogenetic supercolony is going to get wiped out or severly damaged by some pathogen.
I bet it'll be some fungus that likes to dine on them, or perhaps a virus.
Efforts are already underway to introduce parasites and pathogens to control fire ants in the southeast USA, but I haven't heard of anything being done about the Argentine ant.
The Argentine ant does a few things which are harmful, like wiping out native ants and herding and defending aphids (actually quite a large nuisance, leading to crop damage and reduced production), but they don't sting and if they live in/near your house in numbers, they'll wipe out termite colonies--with my own eyes I saw a termite colony in a treestump next to our house get wiped out.
If you could train this ant to kill aphids, get out of sight when the lights go on, and stay out of your food, I think they'd be a great ant to have as a domestic partner to man.
Think about it: no stinging ants, no roaches, no lice, no fleas, no termites, crumbs cleaned off your floor, all manner of insect pests attacked and eaten, and when the lights go on they disappear. Arguably better than any cleaning robot that could be made.
Imagine the agricultural use: train them to eat aphids, scale, caterpillars and any other insect that moves (except bees). Guess what? You don't need insecticides anymore.
These ants are amazing and I want them on MY side, with just a few little changes.
PeterM
heh. good luck. You can't really "train" ants, they don't have enough neurons. Comparing them to robots is probably the best part of your post- ants in general have relatively simple behavior patterns. have you ever played SimAnt from Maxis? It's a good approximation of how ants work in real life.
You could attempt to subject some ants to directed evolution, the same way you can select bacteria for antibiotic resistance (1.you streak some bacteria on a culture dish with a weak antibiotic, and incubate overnight. 2.pick the biggest colonies, because they are the most successful at circumventing the antibiotic. 3 streak the big colonies on a new plate with slightly higher concentration of antibiotic. 4. lather, rinse, repeat until the desired level of resistance is achieved).
The problem you would face is the time to complete a generation. For typical E. Coli on LB agar plates, individual cells divide approximately every 30 minutes- so in a typical day, you have 48 generations of replication where mutations can take place. Even when subjected to mutagens, it often takes 4 or 5 THOUSAND generations before E. Coli genotypes settle down at a local maximum for successful growth-- which usually involves the modification of just one protein, or at most one biochemical pathway. You could reasonably expect the number of necessary generations to be higher when contemplating the structure of more complex organisms... I'm sure someone has done an analysis of carbon dating rocks on the galapagos vs. the generation time of the finches that have radiated into various niches, but I don't have time to poke around for those papers.
Fruit flies are used for genetic research because they have a life cycle that is representative of metamorphosizing insects, a relatively quick generation time, and a diploid genome that facilitates crossing. Still, with a generation time of about 2 weeks, it would take you about 2 years, or 600X as long as for E.coli, to get through 48 generations. And five thousand generations would take you ~200 years.
Hymenoptera generation times are usually even longer, on the order of months to years. Sure, that ant colony has 1000 ants in it running and digging and getting into your pancake mix, but the queen is the only one that can make more queens. And she doesn't ever ever do that until she's established a successful colony. I admit that I don't have any numbers for how long that takes, but if we use the drosophila generation time as a lower bound, and assume 5000 generations necessary to produce a single significant and stable molecular change, and you're looking at a couple of hundred years and a lot of ant farms.
As for training them to run away when the lights come on, I think it would be neater if they were just clear, because then you couldn't see them even when they were there
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.