Adventures Among Ants - Mark W. Moffett [145]
In Argentina, the Argentine ant and the red fire ant fight intensely, as do all the species in that region, but they seem equally matched. If anything, the Argentine ant, for unknown reasons, has the edge.32 Melissa and I saw this for ourselves on our visit to the Paraná River drainage when David Holway dropped a dead grasshopper near some fire ants in the shade of an acacia tree. The fire ants swarmed the grasshopper, but a nearby stream of Argentine ants was diverted to the site as well. Melissa pointed to a fire ant that was waving her abdomen at an Argentine ant, a behavior called flagging. The flagging worker had extruded her stinger, which she slashed at the Argentine ants. Despite this deterrent, the Argentine ants increased in numbers, killed two of the fire ants, and in thirty minutes had taken control of the grasshopper.
An Argentine ant grabbing the leg of a fire ant in a fight to control the dead grasshopper they’re standing on. The fire ant is exuding a drop of poison from her stinger, which she is about to slash across her attacker.
In the southeastern United States, however, the Argentine ant has a hard time because of occasional freezes, which don’t affect the fire ant as adversely. As a result, the fire ant has beaten back the Argentine ant to pockets of resistance in places like Austin, Texas, and Athens, Georgia. The surviving Argentine colonies are smaller than those in California; indeed, they are often no bigger than the colonies in their homeland.33 These diminutive supercolonies are also genetically distinct from one another, presumably reflecting a high frequency of stowaways entering this region from Argentina—no surprise, since the bulk of commerce from Argentina to the United States is to the southern states rather than to the West Coast.34
An editor once asked me to write an article on the red imported fire ant. Given their fiery stings, I sighed with relief when he cancelled the idea after I showed him a few preliminary photographs. Fire ants have little behavioral finesse. Each of my close-up images looked much like the next: dark orange workers, piled high and deep on one thing or another. But make no mistake, the fire ant is formidable. A few humans die each year from their toxins, most often because allergies cause the victim’s throat to swell, inducing suffocation. The fire ant can easily overpower rival ants and even birds and some mammals. By gnawing through anything, edible or not, it is also destructive to crops, farm equipment, and electrical appliances such as air conditioners. As a result, the red imported fire ant poses a worse economic and ecological menace than the Argentine ant. It causes yearly losses in America’s South amounting to $1 billion.35
In 1998, red fire ants were detected in a delivery of plants from a commercial nursery in California, triggering a massive government probe and the destruction of dozens of incipient populations. Now, all of Orange County and parts of nearby Los Angeles and Riverside Counties are under a quarantine enforced by the California Department of Food and Agriculture that regulates the shipment of soils, straw, and live plants—any of which could hide ant stowaways. But with millions of planes, trains, and automobiles entering the state each year, the assault of these ants seems inevitable. And then the trillion ants in the Very Large Colony will likely enter into statewide combat with the stinging red hordes in what will be the next phase of the conquest of California.
conclusion four ways of looking at an ant
We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. . . . If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of