Iridomyrmex humilis
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Iridomyrmex humilis |
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Of all the insects that live with us in Southern California, the Argentine ant is the insect that bothers us the most. You can find these ants crawling around electrical outlets and on bathroom ceilings at any time of the year. You can find ants in your bed or walking in a straight line in your kitchen. If all the buildings in the world disappeared, just leaving the ants in the air, you could still see the outlines of the city. How can these tiny ants manage to be so many places? The answer is the changes that these ants have made in the rules that they live by. Most ants have only one queen in their colony. Argentine ants have a lot of queens, as many as eight for every 1,000 workers. Only queens lay eggs. Since the Argentine ant has more queens, they can raise more babies. These ants raise so many babies that it is almost impossible to kill all of them. Argentine ants will also fight other ants. They can make a special weapon called iridomyr-mecin. They smear this chemical on their enemies to kill them or make them run away.
Because of the social rules of the Argentine ant, they have a monopoly over all the other ants. When they move into new territory they drive out or kill all of the native ants. The Argentine ant first arrived in the United States sometime before 1891. Scientists who study insects, entomologists, watched these ants travel to California in 1905. Argentine ants are good at finding food supplies. They send their sub-colonies, like little armies, to set up camps or bivouacs around the food supply for as long as the food lasts. What do they eat? Like so many pests, or nuisances, the Argentine ant is omnivorous. Argentine ants will eat not only crumbs, but termites and flea eggs (larva). They will also eat insects, earthworms, baby field mice, and candy bars. People who study these ants say that during most of the year, as much as 70% of their diet is made up of honeydew, the sweet sugar stool of aphids, mealybugs, whiteflies, leafhoppers and other sap-sucking insects. The Argentine ant will protect these bugs, killing any predator that tries to eat these insects. Because the Argentine ant likes honeydew so much, it may be possible to get rid of most of them. If everyone in the whole neighborhood would put Vaseline around the trunks of trees and bushes where aphids live,the ant will get trapped and many will go away because they can not get to their favorite food. The other choice would be to spray the entire neighborhood with bug spray or pesticide which will kill all the insects, not just the Argentine ant. What would happen to an ecosystem if all of the first order consumers were destroyed? |
Most ants of the same species will set up their own territory, or sub-colony, and will fight each other over it. Argentine ants do not fight each other over territory. They will allow each other to pass freely across all their areas. Therefore, Argentine ants are called polydomous. Even the queens can move around into the other areas. Argentine ants usually nest outside human habitats. Sometimes, they will set up a colony on the inside, often in the soil of a potted plant.