are ants an issue ?

[Howske]

i have my beautifull plant out side more like a tree but there are ants all over the place does it affect the plant i mean its only recently i saw them all over my plant today piss me off

[mull]

Sometimes the lil buggers carry in afids to work for them. They suck and the ants eat their shit.

Keep an eye out for afid mate.

[DownUnderDoper]

Howske.. the answer is no..... and yes

 

Ants in themselves are no danger to your plants, unless you live in an area that is prone to Leaf cutter ants, HOWEVER, as mullaway said some species of ants 'farm' aphids, some also farm several different species of scale and mealy bugs this is because many of the small sap sucking mites & scales produce a sweet sticky secretion called honeydew, by stimulating the mites back the ants are presented with a drop of honeydew which is a valuable food source, as a tradeoff ants will actively carry these insects around the plant and place them at the softest parts (new growing tips, stem joints, immature flower buds ) so that they can feed easier and breed more. Ants will also carry babies onto nearby plants to increase their 'farm' size. Waste honeydew also gets deposited on the stems and encourages a fungus called Black Sooty Mould as it the mould grows especially well in the sweet sticky residue.

 

Ants themselves wont hurt you.. but their farming practices can seriously fuck with the growing performance of any soft skinned plant, which to them are fertile paddocks. They're as bad as humans

[Tom]

Nice explanation DownUnderDoper.

 

[DownUnderDoper]

Cheers. Edited March 3, 2007 by DownUnderDoper

[stonedstump]

I was just thinking the same thing . You must do your research!

[loylty gets u nothing]

excellent post DUD

im getin some ant x just to be safe

thanks for sharing

puf

[Dave The Nefarious]

excellent post DUD

i only came to learn of the aphids <-> ants symbiotic relationship early this summer when heaps of aphids were on my rose bushes ... i was able to get rid of most by simply hosing them off, but later learnt that the ants at the base of the rose bushes were also a part of the problem as they were basically bodyguards .

 

Ants are bloody amazing, Wiki has a good page on em - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ants

 

In regards to aphids<>ants, it says "Aphids secrete a sweet liquid called honeydew. The sugars provide a high-energy food source, which many ant species use. Normally this is allowed to fall to the ground, but around ants it is kept for them to collect. The ants in turn keep predators away and will move the aphids around to better feeding locations. Upon migrating to a new area, many colonies will take new aphids with them, to ensure that they have a supply of honeydew in the new area. Ants also tend mealybugs to harvest their honeydew. Mealybugs can become a serious pest of pineapple if ants are present to protect mealybugs from natural enemies"

 

Just a few whacky ant facts from that page, including a couple of unique Aussie ants:

- Ants have colonized almost every landmass on Earth. The only places lacking indigenous ant species are Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, and the Hawaiian Islands.

- Up to a third (33%) of the terrestrial animal biomass has been estimated to be made up of ants and termites.

- There are about 11,880 known ant species, most of which are tropical.

- In 1966 E. O. Wilson, et al. obtained the first fossil remains of an ant from the Cretaceous era. The specimen was trapped in amber from New Jersey that was more than eighty million years old.

- Home is often located through the use of remembered landmarks and the position of the sun as detected with compound eyes and also by means of special sky polarization-detecting fibers within the eyes.

- Ants make use of pheromones for other purposes as well. A crushed ant, for example, will emit an alarm pheromone which in high concentration sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy; and in lower concentration, merely attracts them. To confuse their enemies, several ant species even use what are termed propaganda pheromones.

- Jack jumper ants, (Myrmecia pilosula) located in Australia have stings that cause fatality to a small number of people in the population, and cause hospitalizations each year.

- Fire ants (Solenopsis spp.) are unique in having a poison sac containing piperidine alkaloids.

- While many types of animals can learn behaviors by imitating other animals, ants may be the only group of animals besides primates and some other mammals in which interactive teaching behavior has been observed.

- Polyrhachis sokolova, a species of ant found in Australian mangrove swamps, can swim and lives in nests that are submerged underwater. They make use of trapped pockets of air in the submerged nests.

- The Australian bulldog ants are among the biggest and most primitive of ants. The individual hunts alone, using its large eyes instead of its chemical senses to find prey.

- Ants identify kin and nestmates through their scents, a hydrocarbon-laced secretion that coats their exoskeletons. If an ant is separated from its original colony, it will eventually lose the colony scent. Any ant that enters a colony with a different scent than that of the colony will be attacked.

- Ants are associated with other species in a wide variety of ways. These associations include mutualistic and parasitic relationships as well as interactions with more than one species which are not fully understood. Well known relationships are between other insects, especially those that secrete honeydew and those with plants and fungi.

- In some parts of the world large ants, especially army ants, are said to be used as sutures by pressing the wound together and applying ants along it. The ant in defensive attitude seizes the edges in its mandibles and locks in place. The body is then cut off and the head and mandibles can remain in place, closing the wound.

- The successful techniques used by ant colonies has been widely studied especially in computer science and robotics to produce distributed and fault-tolerant systems for solving problems. This area of biomimetics has led to studies of ant locomotion, search engines which make use of foraging trails and fault tolerant storage and networking algorithms.

 

And that's just scratching the surface

[DownUnderDoper]

- In some parts of the world large ants, especially army ants, are said to be used as sutures by pressing the wound together and applying ants along it. The ant in defensive attitude seizes the edges in its mandibles and locks in place. The body is then cut off and the head and mandibles can remain in place, closing the wound.

 

Umm.. just leave me bleeding while I think about that one