4 January 04

Orclets In The Kitchen

Every now and then, our kitchen gets overrun with ants. This seems to happen either in the middle of winter, when the ground is saturated and they may have to move above ground, or in the dead of summer, when I think they come inside looking for water. Right now one is crawling across an envelope next to the laptop bearing a fallen comrade.

These are gourmet ants. They excel at finding bits of asiago cheese and morsels from lemon-apricot bars. I expect them soon to develop a taste for our favorite Chilean merlot, and to walk off with a vat of soup carrying the pot.

We show them no mercy. These are invasive Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) that arrived in California about 100 years ago, spreading up the coast and in urban regions. They have displaced native species of ants and have thus been linked to the decline of the coast horned lizard in Southern California. These ants in California are remarkable in that they have very little genetic variation, much less than the native population back in Argentina. In effect, the entire California branch of this ant species forms a giant supercolony. By now they’ve probably created a large database of our eating habits, and have shared it with the NSA.

Posted by at 09:47 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Yikes! Their lack of genetic variation isn’t so remarkable for an alien invasive species though, from what I read. That makes sense, since invasives are often descended from tiny colonizing poulations – sometimes just a few individuals. In layman’s terms, they’re inbred as all git-out. This means that, in the long term, they can be expected to suffer catastrophic crashes when the pathogens finally catch up with them – so much of their success being due to the lack of biological controls. But by then of course the damage may already be done in terms of the extirpation of native prey or competitors. Here in the northeast, we are seeing the gypsy moth caterpillar fianlly “becoming native,” with multiple controls and only scattered outbreaks, after some 100 years in-country.

    — Dave    10. January 2004, 14:08    Link

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