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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?
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