Them! - Ants and How to Eliminate Them

I still remember the first time I saw the 1950’s movie about nuclear-mutated ants threatening to take over the world, Them. I was quite young and impressionable, and I’ll admit the movie was a little scary. Think about it, GIANT ANTS! A hard, bulletproof exoskeleton, the ability to carry many times their own weight, and huge mandibles that could squish little humans! Yikes.

Well thank goodness we don’t have to worry about giant nuclear ants. Instead, we are faced with countless miniature ants that infest our homes and structures (some tradeoff!). Judge them not by their size, ants are considered to be the most successful of all insect groups with approximately 12,000 species worldwide. They occur in all terrestrial habitats around the world and outnumber many animal species. They are closely related to bees and wasps, sharing both physical characteristics and social organization with these groups. That is, ants exist in eusocial (truly social) societies that provide cooperative care for young, maintain a reproductive division of labor and have overlapping generations.

A common ant example in the minds of many homeowners is the carpenter ant. A black or otherwise dark bodied species, carpenter ant workers vary in size from about 1/4 to 3/4 inch (3.5 to 13 mm) in length. Like all insects, they have three body parts and six legs. They have a diverse diet, feeding on many kinds of plant and animal foods that are either living or dead. During the hot summer months (right about now!) they tend to forage for food at night, making their presence unknown to unsuspecting homeowners.

Carpenter ants nest in a number of different locations: stumps, hollow logs, telephone poles, fence posts and structural wood. Indoors they might target windowsills, doors, roofs, porch columns, or other hollow structures such as pipes. Nests in a home could be a satellite colony, a smaller collection of ants that do not have an actively reproducing queen and are instead a break from the larger parent colony.

Contrary to popular belief, carpenter ants (and carpenter bees for that matter) do not actually eat wood, but use it strictly for nesting. In order to feed and derive nutrition from wood, insects such as termites require a symbiotic relationship with microorganisms to digest cellulose. Not having this mutualism prevents ants from eating wood, but not from destroying it! In fact, ants can be a little picky when it comes to the wood they infest. They specifically target moist wood that is partially decayed and easy to chew through with their mighty mandibles. This means that carpenter ants are a product or indicator of a structural problem (water damage), and not necessarily the initial cause of the damage. The first thing to do when you suspect a carpenter ant infestation is to identify sources or moisture: clogged gutters, roof leaks, cracked pipes, etc.

As a kid (before the trauma of Them!), I enjoyed watching ants follow their strictly defined paths. Although carpenter ants sometimes diverge from this behavior and forage randomly, somehow they always find their way home and use pheromones, chemical communication signals, to navigate. When they arrive home, they kindly share the bounty of their harvest with others in the community via a process known as trophallaxis. It’s a fun word, say it out loud: Tro-pha-laxis. This term describes the exchange of nourishment between two insects, and in ants occurs mouth to mouth (indeed there are other ways this happens in the insect world…). This behavior has been targeted by scientists, successfully reducing the amount of product necessary to control damaging ant species. Regardless of whether baits (sugary or salty depending on the time of year) or sprays (with particles ingested during insect grooming) are used, our products make their way into the ant digestive system. Back at the nest, these products are spread throughout the colony via trophallaxis, eventually killing not just workers, but the larvae and queen. Control of the entire colony is therefore possible by strategic placement of baits, eliminating the need for wholesale spraying of large areas to wipe out a nest.