24-07-2004, 12:04 PM
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Can ants cause structural damage?
The message
from (Nick Maclaren) contains these words:
18" deep, and few ants nests go down much more. In the
UK, that is - the same does NOT apply in the tropics!
In the tropics some of the species of White Ant are a serious threat to
buildings. They chew the wood and use the pulp for mushroom growing.
They then eat the mushrooms. The method of control is to search for the
queen and destroy her. The colony then breaks up and, hopefully, dies
out.
Safari ants are another kettle of fish! They bivouwac (Sp?) overnight
in ball shaped groups with the queen at the centre, each group can
number many hundreds of thousands of individuals. At daybreak the bivvy
breaks up and the ants form long columns consuming all living things in
their path. Obviously not every single organism is consumed, some
escaping. The columns move out from the bivvy in an arc and then bivvy
again. The next day the columns move in a different arc, eventually
coming full circle. This is a fascinating process to observe, but not
one for the faint hearted! Other tropical ants are capable of deep
excavations, probably to escape the heat of the baked earth.
HTH,
Compo - 2 years in Ethiopia, living with termites and Safari ants.
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