SF Chronicle: A chemical semaphor to set off gang warfare among those pesky Argentine brown ants
The Tracker’s backyard, front yard, and both side yards are full of”em. I swept the front steps yesterday for a meeting of the board of the Northern California Science Writers Association and they poured in skittering brigades from the fissures in the concrete against the garage. They blithely thrive among the Grant’s ant stakes a man at the nursery recommended. They often wander around in the kitchen. They infest the passion flower vine. As an invasive species Argentine ants are not up there with kudzu or zebra mussels but they are a pain.
This week UC Berkeley put out a press release declaring that some of its researchers, in the Brit journal BMC Biology, are reporting discovery of the insects’ chemical friend-or-foe signal that, until now, has kept nearly all the myriad nests of these things from attacking one another. It seems that here in California they are essentially one big happy tribe or super-colony that hasn’t the collective brains or genetic diversity to know its outposts should fight over territory. Not that they’re pacifists – they have pushed out native ants from most places in well-watered urban gardens. But now: dose’em with the right elixir and they go into a fratricidal frenzy. Or so they hope. Yay, I say.
Not many takers except old friend at the San Francisco Chronicle, David Perlman who called up an outside expert from the California Academy of Sciences and got a corroborating opinion. He spun for his readers the tale of the decoding of “the secret chemical language” of these creatures “that march into Bay Area homes every time the weather turns cold or wet.” Maybe he has these things at his house too. Perhaps a new, targeted pesticide is in the works.
Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;
Pic source NSW Agricultural Scientific Collections Trust, Australia.
- Charlie Petit
