Boulder
Small black ants have invaded our kitchen. They make up for their small size with their large numbers; on a recent morning hundreds, even thousands, formed a dense trail from a small crack in the molding to the kitchen trash.
When the first few appeared, my wife said, “You’re the world expert on ants, you get rid of them.” But a lifetime of studying the behavior of ants and bees and a career teaching entomology and animal behavior at the University of Colorado hasn’t prepared me in the slightest for this task, as killing bugs is decidedly not a part of my training.
I resisted familial encouragement to spray our kitchen with insecticides. The chemicals are probably safe, used as the label directs, but I’m more squeamish about poisons near my food than about ants.
My first stab at the problem was to purchase poison baits designed to kill ants; these at least don’t involve broadcasting sprayed chemicals. Cute little ant houses, with fragrant, peanut-butter-smelling baits, placed at strategic locations killed exactly zero ants. Whatever they like to eat, peanut butter isn’t on their list.
At this point, the ants still numbered in the dozens, and it wasn’t clear exactly where they were coming in. “Just wait,” I intoned in my best professorial expert voice, “once they build up a trail, I can see how they’re getting into the kitchen and then I’ll take care of them.”
Another couple of nights of giving the ants unfettered access to our kitchen allowed, as predicted, their numbers to grow from a few dozen to hundreds, with a trail plainly leading back to a small gap between a kitchen cabinet and the tile backsplash. “No problem,” I said, “I’ll just buy some caulk, fill their hole, and they’ll be gone.”
And caulk I did. For a day, there were no more ants. But on the second morning, their trail resembled cars on Colorado Boulevard during rush hour.
At this point familial hostility (to me, not the ants) was palpable.
But the second hole was only a couple of inches from the first, and caulk once again stemmed the tide.
The Fourth of July weekend in the mountains allowed my family some rest. The ants got three days to apply their collective intelligence to the problem presented by the caulk. No one ant is particularly smart, but given a few thousand ants to exert trial-and-error tactics, they seem to be smarter than the average human. Or at least smarter than this human.
They’re certainly capable of finding any small breach in the barriers I throw up to keep them out. Just imagine winning the lottery by randomly guessing numbers. One person doing this would be fairly hopeless, but a few thousand people guessing will come up with the right answer pretty quickly. Because the ants share their answers with their friends, it takes only one lucky ant to bring the entire horde back into the kitchen.
The new gap is about a foot from the previously caulked gaps, and giving them extra time over the holiday allowed the ants to develop such enthusiasm for our trash that their raiding column now looks like Interstate 70 on a ski weekend.
In my household, I’m no longer considered the world expert at anything. I’ve been humiliated by creatures the size of this printed “I,” but am still stuck with stemming their flow.
Caulk is doing the trick for the moment, but my only real hope of regaining credibility is to rise early every morning, before the rest of the family, and caulk the ants’ newly discovered gap. I can then blithely evade the question, “Any ants this morning?” without outright lying: “Do you see any?”
Michael Breed is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
