Invasion of Invincible Ants 25
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."
another link about this story (Score:1)
Funny, I was just reading that story just when it appeared on slashdot.
excerpts :
In rare cases, the sting provokes an allergic reaction that can kill. In the southern United States, infested since the 1930s, 84 people have died.
The ants represent a threat to Australia's outdoors way of life. Activities such as camping and barbecues are out of the question in affected areas; even sitting in the back garden with a book can be a painful experience. In some American states, schools, parks and sports fields have had to be closed.
Re:Airdrops of Thorny Devils... (Score:1)
You make them out to be like Borg ants (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Nuke the ants (Score:1)
Assuming that GM crops would poison the ants, the ants would merely find other food and the crops would end up depleting native species. Think about the cane toad, which never developed a taste for sugarcane-eating grubs, but kill many carnivorous marsupials which find the poisonous toads somehow tasty.
Then there's also the starlings, sparrows, rabbits, and foxes, to name a few.
Even nukes may not work well because the nests are so deep. It may be necessary to treat each nest individually.
Re:You make them out to be like Borg ants (Score:1)
Besides, if they are worried about an environmental disaster, genetically modified plantlife going awry would be orders of magnitude worse. Imagine not being able to eat wheat because it is poisonous to fire ants AND humans.
Hopefully their current method of extermination works without resorting to killer plants.
oh no it's (Score:1)
Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,USA (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,US (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,US (Score:1)
Re:Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,US (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,US (Score:1)
Re:Sounds like the Argentine ant invasion in CA,US (Score:2)
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? [geocities.com] It's a good approximation of how ants work in real life.
You could attempt to subject some ants to directed evolution [caltech.edu], 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
Not *that* bad... (Score:2, Informative)
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.)
Re:Not *that* bad... (Score:1)
Heh, I'm a Yankee, hadn't ever been exposed to fire ants before. I went down to visit relatives in Georgia and decided to see what a fire ant sting felt like.
Well, they sting, but it's not terrible. I find wasp and hornet stings much more painful than fire ant stings. As you point out, thousands of stings will kill a person, but thousands of ordinary honeybee stings will do the same.
As for me, I am allergic to hornets so one sting from a hornet = death. Aussies know how to deal with deadly insects, the fire ant will be no big deal.
Re:Not *that* bad... (Score:2)
These are fire ants ... (Score:1)
People in the US have been dealing with fire ants for years. You learn to watch where you step (I think Aussies already do this: funnel web spiders, venomous snakes, etc.) You learn to not throw your sunbathing towel over an ant hill. You learn to not leave sweet things laying about in the house.
Fire ants sting. The stings hurt. They can kill sensitive people, much as can wasps and bees. They are neither invincible (there's a little wasp that thinks fire ants are tasty, and chemical warfare can create a state of stalemate) nor are they so prevalent that one cannot learn to live with them.
This article is hysterical to the tune of the US' fear of so-called "killer bees", which are indeed nasty and tempermental, but you'll note that in South America, where Africanized honeybees originated, although a few more people die of bee attacks every year life pretty much goes on as normal for the continent's millions of inhabitants.
There is an article at the ABC about this (Score:1)
The Fire Ants that have shown up appear to be from two different parts of the world. What makes this article stand out is that it shows how the authorities in Queensland are planning on dealing with the problem. Also it shows the reports of how the Fire Ants have affected the lives of some people already. It is possible that the BBC ariticle was based upon some of the sources that were used to produce this one.
Personally I hope that they reduce this problem to an "acceptable" level. Given that erradication is going to be near impossible. Queensland already has problems with "cane toads", which were originally indtroduced to deal with something else (it was a plant from memory). All 3 levels of Government (local, state, federal) are fully aware of that mistake and the affect it has made.
The cane toads can eat the fire ants. (Score:1)
Australia always seems to have problems with alien species. If this is typical, there will soon be fire ant mounds the size of houses, and they will cover the ground in square mile swarms. Then billions of cane toads will zoom in and eat them, then, uh, there will be billions of really fat cane toads hopping around.