
Jun. 4, 2009 by Judy
Ant In Da Pants (and cupboards and fruit trees and so forth)
Most people don’t spend a lot of
time thinking about ants. If your
career does not depend on knowing one thing or another about them—the focus of
an ecologist being different than the focus of a pest control person—you
probably either a. hate them for one reason or another, usually having to do
with a childhood trauma or b. overlook them unless you find them in your sugar
bowl.
When I was about 4 years old,
living in Germany with my mother at the time, I became desperately concerned
that a colony of ants in the walled garden might not be getting enough to
eat. I recall concocting a mass of
foul-smelling goo, pretty heavy on the eggs, and pouring said goo over the
entrance of the nest. The garden
smelled like vomit for days, and I doubt the ants were grateful. I think I felt better, though. I was a different child.
Most people I talk to here in
Hawaii, both visitors and locals, seem surprised to hear that ants are not part
of the original fauna. Popular bio-wisdom estimates we’ve got between 30 and 50
species of ants here now, and I’d like you to stop and think for a moment and
realize they all got here in the last couple thousand years, with MOST of them
arriving in the last couple of hundred years. They are very small, very tenacious, and mighty good at
adapting to new places.
In the many variable types of
dwellings I’ve inhabited during my years here, I’ve seen different ants in
different places at different times of year looking for different things. Some come in summer and want water. Some appear in winter and I don’t know
what they’re after, but they won’t leave the kitchen counter alone. Some form highways on the inside walls,
some never come inside, and some will crawl all over you while you’re camping
on the ground and never so much as poke you with bad intent, much less
sting. They just tickle, and make
it hard to sleep.
Generally, I leave them be. I’m a bigger fan of living with
crumb-cleaning counter dwellers than I am of inhaling toxic whatnot designed to
control insects while bending my chromosomes. Ick. That being
said, I am not without opinion about the presence of ants in Hawaii. And that opinion is the equivalent of
banging my head on a wall. They’re
making a mess of things.
Ecological things.
I was a child in Texas at the time
that fire ants first moved in.
Within the span of 10 years we lost all ground-nesting animals. The ground went sterile except for the
columns of red and relentless carnivores with absolutely evil stings. Back and forth to their mounds they
went, and everything they could carry went with them. I once saw a video of a horse, yes, a HORSE taken down by
relentless swarms of fire ants. It
stumbled and went down on its knees and finally fell and went into shock. Why am I telling you this horrible
story? Because fire ants have been
introduced to the Big Island.
The Big Island has the potential,
many of us believe, to feed the rest of us here in the state. That island, that Eden of multitudes of
microclimates, could at the very least feed itself quite comfortably. The stories I hear now, however, say
that farmers fear entering their orchards and fields due to attacks of the fire
ants—a smaller species than I knew when I was a child, but just as relentless,
just as efficient. Here’s a quote
from the website: http://www.hawaii.edu/ant/home/home.html
In 1999, another tramp ant was
discovered on the Big Island. The little fire ant, Wasmannia auropunctata,
native to South America, is already a serious introduced pest in New Caledonia,
Gabon, and the Galapagos Islands. It probably arrived in Hawai`i in the soil of
potted plants, and it is now known from approximately twenty locations on the
Big Island. Studies of this ant in other regions forewarn us of the potential
for negative impacts in Hawai`i. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature
(IUCN), a global group of over one hundred science and policy experts,
considers Wasmannia auropunctata one of the 100 worst pest species in the
world.
Ants have come to Hawaii in
fruit, lumber, cloth, soil…you name it.
They’ve come from such places as Africa, S.E. Asia, Brazil, the
Indo-Pacific Area and Australia.
Like the rest of us, they take the opportunity to travel when it
presents itself.
Also, like us, ants are highly
social species. They don’t do well
without each other, the colony, their specialized roles. Hawaii is unique in having no endemic
(found only here) social species—our bees and our wasps, for instance, are
solitary. All hive insects of that
type are introduced. Imagine the
changes in the ecology of not only flowering plants, but also of prey (wasps
tend to prey on other insects) organisms in the islands. We live in a net of delicate
connections. Into this net has
dropped a whole new way of living. For many organisms endemic to Hawaii, this
is not a workable situation.
Suddenly, these organisms are shouldered aside, out-competed, or eaten
outright.
What’s to be done?
Well, if you’d like to see how
the State’s forces are marshaled, check out the Ant Plan at this site: http://www.hear.org/hawaiiantgroup/hawaiiantplan
Otherwise, when you’re packing to
leave for Hawaii, take a good long look in those shoes that have been sitting
outside on the step, at the corners of that old suitcase incubating in the
garage, and in the Ziploc package of goodies you’re bringing to Auntie
Pualani. If you cart something in
here that takes out avocado trees (not native, but not invasive, and clearly a
gift from the gods) in the next few years, well, I may just have to hunt you
down myself. But that’s just the
revenge of one avocado addict. If you bring something here that helps silence
of the native birds, that bends and breaks a lovely tree that’s been cresting
our mountains for thousands of years, that quenches the hum of a solitary
insect which has so long been working for the joy of working…well, that’s some
sadness there.
Let’s avoid it.