images & thoughts \ weekly \ Grabov Rat

small & fast & strong & useful

So I say for "our" small ants. "Our" because we share the same quarters - and they might be of the same opinion. They are small, very small, around 2 mm. I’ve tried to identify them but without a device of substantial magnification it’s hopeless; the suspects are Pharaoh ant (Monomorium pharaonis, the prime suspect), Ghost ant (Tapinoma melanocephalum), and Thief ant (Solenopsis molesta), which are often confused anyway. I’ll refer to them as THEY. Actually, I didn’t continue the internet search because most of the relevant webpages are ‘how to kill small ants’ - and I found THEY are useful.

The most annoying pests at Grabov Rat, this time of year, are wasps. We kill them in dozens everyday - insignificant for their population, however - but at least we don’t have to take care of their disposal, THEY do that. The photo on the right shows three dead wasps being carried away. That is an astonishing fact by itself because a wasp, by volume and mass, is several thousands times a small ant [ROLLOVER]. And THEY do that on a path of 3 to 4 meters across our terrace in less than one hour. It is like a group of men, large in number but without any machinery, move a 100 tons object for 2 km in less than one hour.

The scouting for a wasp’s corpse, marking a path to it, commu- nicating about it, preparing for the transport - I spent hours watching those high sophisticated technological operations. Preparing for the transport, that’s a very puzzling one. It’s done by a group of twenty to thirty small ants, maybe a bit smaller than a group involved in the transport, so that each individual ant gets in short contact with the corpse, for a few seconds, runs a loop in the corpse vicinity, very fast - in approximately a second, repeats the contact, and so many times. THEY don’t carry away any parts of the corpse. Do THEY inject a gas lighter than air?

I estimate the loop to be of length of about 6 cm. That means, a small ant is running a path equivalent to about 30 his own lengths in a second. An athlete breaking a world record on 100 meters is running only 5 his own heights in a second.