Ants are as Effective as Pesticides

http://scitech.au.dk/en/roemer/5-2015/ants-are-as-effective-as-pesticides/

by dave446 • 11 years ago

194 84 11 years ago

scitech.au.dk

One three-year study in Australia recorded cashew yields 49% higher in plots patrolled by ants compared with those protected by chemicals. Nut quality was higher too, so net income was 71% higher with ants than with chemicals.

With results like these, there must be some reason why this was not discovered and put to widespread use already. What are is down side? Containment? How to keep them from spreading to unwanted areas, like the farm house?

TsiCClawOfLight• 11 years ago

Maybe I'm cynical, but I would say Monsanto.

heliumcraft• 11 years ago

Poe's law?

ZoeZoeBee3• 11 years ago

You can use pesticides to keep the pests out of the farmhouse, Always best to keep the help separate ;)

NeutronBoy2• 11 years ago

At least in Australia, the existing equivalent case study is Cane Toads, which didn't turn out so well. I can understand why people may be hesitant to try with ants.

PhasmaFelis• 11 years ago

This is a good point. Humans have a long history of deliberately introducing invasive species to control pests, and it almost always ends in disaster.

MaysonL• 11 years ago

Not to speak of rabbits…

clord• 11 years ago

Cane toads are introduced. Are you telling me Australia has no ants?

chepin• 11 years ago

It seems that the ants do not transmit diseases, unlike other insects.

malyk• 11 years ago

In my backyard garden the argentine ants farm aphids and red scale (at least) on my plants. So...don't use argentine ants. They are jerks!

tsotha2• 11 years ago

That was my experience. If you don't use pesticides spiders and ladybird beetles will come along and eat the aphids... unless the ants are protecting them. I ended up having to put tanglefoot around the base of all my trees.

kragen• 11 years ago

The even bigger problem with Argentine ants is that many species of them are leaf-cutters. Leaf-cutters will defoliate your plants, not protect them! Especially your roses.

JoBrad• 11 years ago

Or Fire Ants (prevalent in the Southern US, and rapidly growing and moving farther north)

fallingmeat• 11 years ago

Ants are also annoying. Come to Oakland and experience the 'pesticides' for yourself!

ZoeZoeBee3• 11 years ago

This is certainly worth a look in places like Florida and California. I assume there are hurdles to importing these into the foreign countries like the US, not to mention the lobbying Monsanto will surely be doing to prevent lost revenue. It turns out the Chinese have used these effectively for over a thousand years, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaver_ant

colwem• 11 years ago

The specific hurdle mentioned in the article is that they only live in the tropics. However they do mention research looking at using wood ants to protect Maize or to control winter moths in temperate regions.

ZoeZoeBee3• 11 years ago

Yeah, I said Florida and California....

Anyways the weaver Ant is endemic to places that are not just the tropics, they've been used on citrus plants in China since 400 AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaver_ant

benfrederickson• 11 years ago

Not only can ants be used as pesticide - in some cases they also act as a herbicide and kill weeds and other plants that compete with their host tree: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7058/full/437495a... . Probably not useful for farming, but still cool.

Tloewald• 11 years ago

I think that in general we need to see ourselves as part of an ecosystem rather absence of one -- eg rather than try to kill all the "bugs" in our homes, figure out which ones might be beneficial.

It's taken a long time for us to take this approach to intestinal flora and skin bacteria -- we need to think this way about everything.

WalterBright2• 11 years ago

I once had an infestation of spiders. I called the exterminator, who said I didn't have a spider problem. I had an ant problem - the spiders were there eating the ants. Dealing with the ants took care of the spider problem.

There's a great book on this kind of thing: "Common Sense Pest Control".

jader201• 11 years ago

So... did he exterminate the ants, or eliminate whatever it was they were after?

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

One of my current side projects is to connect a pair of galvos, a 3 watt IR laser diode, and openCV to run when I'm not there calling it "High Tech Pest Control with Photons" :-)

We tend to get Argentine ants in the Bay Area and they do attract spiders, but they also keep down the cockroach population. So there are arguments for and against keeping them.

martin-adams• 11 years ago

Essentially the 5 Whys used practically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

efnx• 11 years ago

Unless you have an aphid infestation. Here in Northern California ants farm aphids and are damn good at it. Your plants will have aphids all over them.

analog31• 11 years ago

This is, in fact, how I knew that one of my trees had an aphid infestation.

mikeytown2• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpJibC5iA0 - A video showing the relationship between ants and aphids. The ants protect the aphids on the plant from a number of predators and in return the aphids provide the ants with food in the form of honeydew.

ultimape• 11 years ago

Interestingly, there are some studies that suggest the aphids secrete the honeydew as a response to high lady-bug populations. In nature, it's hard to tell who is taking advantage of who.

I <3 ants: https://twitter.com/ultimape/status/586512292403093505

theophrastus2• 11 years ago

i always thought that domesticating insects would be a great boon for humanity. and/or, why did we stop at honeybees and silk-worms? termites for bio-reclamation, locusts for invasive plant control, dragonflies for extermination of mosquitoes, cockroaches for subterranean telemetry.. (probably avoiding preying-mantises out of a sense of 'what could possibly go wrong?')

twic• 11 years ago

probably avoiding preying-mantises out of a sense of 'what could possibly go wrong?'

It's not like ants have a completely clean record there either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuhgBvOWb_k

theophrastus2• 11 years ago

absolutely; any arthropod that was featured in a horror film (which admittedly covers a lot of ground;'them, it, she, and, the blob' (yes yes most of those aren't arthropods))

michaelmior• 11 years ago

Not often I get the chance to make a Magic School Bus reference: https://youtu.be/vlnmIx37ZMg?t=939

tuxidomasx• 11 years ago

Not to mention using insects as food sources-- grasshoppers, crickets, worms, etc. Excellent sources for protein and super efficient to raise pound-for-pound.

I guess the biggest obstacles are the cultural ones.

TheGrassyKnoll• 11 years ago

http://chapul.com/why-eat-crickets

SixSigma• 11 years ago

Edward O Wilson also suggested farming reptiles for meat in his famous book "Biodiversity"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson

Terr_• 11 years ago

probably avoiding preying-mantises

What about just using their DNA?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k1_aKPIdnU&t=0m20s

mhartl2• 11 years ago

You want ants? Because this is how you get ants.

gnufrra• 11 years ago

Biological pest control is not a silver bullet. We have a history littered with biological pest control disasters. These studies need to take into account effect on native biodiversity. For example Hawaii introduce mongoose to control rats as it turn out they will kill native birds more than the rats.

ggchappell2• 11 years ago

Just a wee bit off-topic, but:

The situation with the native species of Hawaii is actually much worse than most people are aware -- even people who live in Hawaii. I read somewhere[1] that, if you walk around a typical coastal town in Hawaii, and look at the lawns & gardens & parks, and watch the birds & whatnot, that you will generally not see any native species at all. The ones big enough to see are all confined to the interior.

EDIT. And, by the way, the rats weren't native, either. Hawaii has exactly two native mammals: the Hawaiian Hoary Bat and the Hawaiian Monk Seal.

[1] I think it was in Remains of a Rainbow, by D. Liittschwager & S. Middleton. https://amazon.com/dp/0792264126/

lutorm3• 11 years ago

It seems defining what "native" means on Hawaii is a bit sketchy. Clearly no animals were on the islands when they first were created, so everything is more or less "invasive".

Speaking of ants that live in trees, the Big Island is being overrun by the Little Fire Ant, which has already spread across much of the rainy side. I'm sure it protects the trees from pests, too, but in this case that unfortunately also includes humans. They have a nasty bite, and are very hard to control, which is making farming in infested areas hell. http://littlefireants.com/

ambicapter• 11 years ago

Seems like a world of difference between letting ants do their thing and importing mongooses to hawaii.

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

It's not the tools it's the mindset. Thinking of ways to tip the balance and wipe out pests so that you can grow a highly vulnerable monoculture crop is a very fragile solution that is dynamically unstable.

We should be thinking in terms of systems not silver bullets. Lots of farms do this and it's honestly not that hard, it just requires knowledge, process, and some diligence. But we've been defaulting toward auto-pilot agriculture for so long that it's a bit of a dramatic shift.

DennisP2• 11 years ago

The farmers in this article are using native ants, which they collect from the wild.

sliken• 11 years ago

I'd like the same thing for homes. I'd happily buy a bag of sugar occasionally to be guaranteed to never have termites.

DonGateley3• 11 years ago

I think they are just as attracted to the termites themselves. They love the eggs.

mhartl2• 11 years ago

Such stories of ecologically friendly pest control are hard to resist, but unfortunately the history of introducing species A to control species B is littered with cautionary tales.

Pephers• 11 years ago

Yes, please! What really concerns me the most about conventional farming is the tendency to control, tame, and in result fight nature (with chemicals), rather than cooperate. This is of course a consequence of large monotonous fields with a single crop, which provides habitat for diseases and pests in very specific niches but leaves out the natural predators (such as ants in this example).

yellowapple• 11 years ago

As someone who grew up raising fruit trees: ants are the pests, since (at least the Argentine ones that I normally deal with) they not only farm aphids and such, but also frequently are the ones actually eating produce. Granted, in my particular case I didn't really care, since a couple ant-holes don't really hurt anything if you're gonna cut up the fruit for a pie or something anyway (just wash 'em real good first), but it's kind of hard to sell fruit to the general public when said fruit has obviously been eaten at by six-legged hive-minded vermin.

Ants are cool and all, but they're also jerks, and I find much satisfaction in the latest trend of pouring molten metal into anthills to make artwork.

DonGateley3• 11 years ago

I ceased killing invasive ants with borax, a substance taken back to the hive to destroy it, when during one such defense I saw them divert from the track I was poisoning to attack newly hatched termites that were emerging from under an appliance. They were incredibly effective. They also raid termite colonies and carry away the eggs. I switched to a lemon oil based repellent applied locally as needed.

lutorm3• 11 years ago

At least here in Hawaii, predation by ants apparently is not effective at preventing termite infestations. They eat them, yeah, but they don't actually significantly affect the nests, according to what I've heard at least.

DonGateley3• 11 years ago

I'd bet it depends on the kind of ant and the kind of termite. I'm in Northern Ca and haven't seen trace of a termite since I stopped killing the ant colonies.

mapmap• 11 years ago

This is not true in all cases. On citrus trees I've seen ants "farm" aphids and scales by protecting them from their natural enemies and eating their excreted nectar. Left alone this combo can easily kill a small citrus tree.

nostromo• 11 years ago

Ladybugs will clear out a garden of aphids in no time. You can buy them online.

keenerd• 11 years ago

Please DO NOT buy ladybugs online if you live in the US. These will almost certainly be Asian ladybugs, an invasive species that is displacing the native American ladybugs.

https://www.creaturecontrol.net/insect-pest-control/asian-la...

Asian ladybugs are no more effective at dealing with aphids, but they are easier to farm. So you'll unfortunately get them when mail-ordering.

reitanqild2• 11 years ago

First real plum season this year after I killed off a ant colony farming aphids under my plum tree. :-)

Edit: Used boiling water to take out the nest, then sprinkled a mix of potato starch with fine ground sugar around. I don't want to much poison on and around my fruit trees.

And yes: up to 6 ladybugs had a party in that tree for three consecutive days. I read somewhere that each of them can munch up to 100 aphids a day so I guess there was quite a few to start with.

smcl• 11 years ago

What was the potato starch and ground sugar for?

veddox• 11 years ago

Very interesting approach! Ants are fascinating creatures, I used to spend hours as a kid watching them build their nests or raid a termite colony...

And although I agree with many of the other posters here that one has to be extremely careful with biological pest control when using imported species, I still think that on the whole this approach is definitely better than poisoning the ecosystem with chemicals. Of course one has to do one's homework first, thoroughly, to avoid "Hawaiian mongoose disasters". But after that has been done, let's go for it!

frobozz2• 11 years ago

The opposite is true in the case of aphids, which are pretty serious destroyers of crop-yielding plants.

Some ants farm aphids for their honeydew. Rather than destroying them, they encourage their population on the growing-tips of plants. If you introduce aphid-eating insects, such as ladybirds or lacewings, the ants will fight off the attackers.

mattraibert• 11 years ago

Maybe a bit off topic but reading this brought me back to the early nineties when I first got a copy of SimAnt. The instruction manual was filled with information about ants. I remember staying up all night reading about these amazing creatures!

Ants are as Effective as Pesticides

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