"John Savage" wrote in message

I do wonder whether there might be meat-loving ants in the garden
that
go around collecting grubs off the cabbages, and aphids off radish
leaves, etc. Can anyone vouch for this? Maybe not all ants in the
garden
are undesirable.

I used to do furniture making classes with a world wide expert on
ants. For some reason the Japanese are fascinated with ants and he
was always either being filmed or interviewed by them or asked to
Japan to talk about them Lord knows what the film crews thought of
some of the places he used to drag them off to.

Can't remember his surname now but he was Dr. Bob Something or other.
At lunch time we would always find some sort of ant and he would
instantly say: "It's a 'xxxx xxxx'" giving it's Latin name and then he
would either squash it because it was an introduced species or
carefully put it right back where we found it if it was a native ant.

Anyway, I know that I have at least 5 different types of ants in my
garden. I haven't a clue what they are except black, brown and blue.
They have never bothered me except when they have bitten me (rarely)
or done damage to anything that I can identify. In fact the big 1cm
long brown ants have been the most reliable forecasters of rain that
we can identify with the exception of the Black Cockatoos. When the
big brown ants start building up dam walls around the entrance to
their nests we know it is going to rain. I've never had any need to
poison ants outside but have had to do so in the kitchen.