A worldwide community photographing and learning about wildlife
Project Noah Nature School
Iridomyrmex anceps or Iridomyrmex rufoniger
Small ants attending larva of butterfly and a leafhopper nymph (on right)
Spotted on Nov 10, 2011
Submitted on Dec 3, 2011
13 Comments
Regardless ,this is a great spotting! I always enjoy drawing ants!
(-:
Maybe we should have anteaters as pets! I think they are cute. That is the only natural way of controlling ants that I can think of!!
Thinking as an ecologist ants only set new colonies when food supply is good. A colony, once established will survive several years. You will need local knowledge to remove a nest.
So true Martini. Biological pest control is the way to go. There is increasing awareness and pest control companies are selling Sac of praying Mantis eggs as natural pest control. They also release praying Mantis in your garden.
What i was basically trying to highlight was that the fire ants are home invaders and can be dangerous. It is so difficult to kill these ants . You cannot get rid of these unless you kill the queen.
Initially it was thought that they attacked only if their mounds were disturbed.
Who would have thought that ants are capable of such attacks.
Emma, I think that biodiversity is the key ingredient to balance in nature. While insects like fire ants can be aggressive, biological control is more sensible than toxic pest control. Any species increasing in numbers quickly creates opportunities for the many predator species. Human mono-cultures create exaggerated feast and famine cycles with only bad consequences as you've outlined.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/199...
Ants can be lethal to humans to,Read the aboce link and see how 10 people were victimized. @ died after the ant attack. This also includes a five day old baby who was put into a coma after an ant attack.
All the above facilities had been treated for pest control!
In San Franscisco,when it gets cold the ants seek refuge inside the home and it can get really annoying.
I believe that invertebrates must be capable of feeling some pain. Maybe for them it is only registered as discomfort. This is necessary to feed into their survival mechanisms. Fish feel more and mammals, maybe the most.
or the predator injects some toxin to immobilize the victim.... there has to be something which we humans do not know.
Well I would certainly like to believe that they do not feel the pain due to the way there nervous system is!
That is what they thought about fish all along. But now research proved that fish do feel pain and therefore hooks are banned here.
My thinking is that fear has a paralyzing effect and that the animal literally dies of fear!
Emma, while your reading about stab victims is certainly true, human nerve function is sophisticated and can seize during trauma. Based on the simplicity of nerve structure in invertebrates, and their small brains, it is not likely that they feel very much at all, and hardly process the feelings that they do get. This is my idea only and maybe rather speculative. What do you think?
I feel bad for wild life because they get eaten alive. I hope that some mechanism kicks in while the animal is being eaten to ease the pain!I
i read somewhere that a murder victim of multiple stab wounds is totally unconscious and does not feel the pain after the first stab wound.
Here are the next stages of the larvae
http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/890...