Interviewees featured in this episode:
Gregor Koschate, environment officer with Kehl city council in Germany
Tanya Latty, entomologist and associate professor at the University of Sydney's School of Life and Environmental Sciences in Australia
Jack Longino, an ant expert and professor of biology at the University of Utah in the US
Cleo Bertelsmeier, ant ecologist and associate professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolution of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland
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Transcript:
Gregor Koschate: The ants dominate my day-to-day work at the moment. They've pretty much taken over. I even dream about ants - it's almost impossible not to.
Gregor Koschate is the environment officer in Kehl.
Kehl is a town on the Rhine River in southern Germany, right next to the French border. And lately it’s been getting national media attention. Because of an exploding population of ants
Collage of news clips
Gregor Koschate: This is the famous distribution box that was featured in the news many times. This is where the ants actually caused the internet outages…these boxes are not insect proof and the ants built a nest in there which ended up causing a short circuit.
Several properties in this part of Kehl have had internet and power outages. The ants have also burrowed under sidewalks and paving stones. They’ve built nests in kids’ playgrounds, and entered some homes and gardens en masse – moving in dense black clumps and multi-lane ant highways. Gregor says he’d never seen anything like it before.
Gregor Koschate: I just couldn't believe it. Seeing hundreds of animals swarming out of such a nest within 2-3 seconds and turning a huge area black. It's really alarming.
The ant species in question is Tapinoma Magnum. Gregor estimates that in this part of Kehl, there are several million of the ants, and they’ve colonized an area up to four hectares – almost 8 football fields.
Gregor Koschate: It's certainly a psychological burden for the people here. It affects their homes and property. And they feel kind of helpless because there's nothing they can do about it.
Ants have been around for a lot longer than humans – since the Jurassic period.
They’re found all over the world... on every continent except Antarctica. They can live in soil, in trees, below ground, in leaf matter, in deserts … and in cities.
Ants may be tiny, but they play a huge role in our world. They’re a crucial part of healthy ecosystems. But, like the Tapinoma Magnum, they can also wreak havoc when they end up in new habitats.
Tanya Latty: This is the dark side of ants, I guess -- that they are amongst some of the worst invasive species.
I’m Neil King. On this episode of Living Planet, we’ll go inside the amazing world of ants:
-The dark side,
-The light,
Jack Longino: Ants have fascinated people for a long time … ants are cool…
-And the downright weird.
Jack Longino:… as diverse and crazy as mammals of the Serengeti, these wild and crazy looking things.
Hunting ants isn’t quite what Gregor imagined he’d be doing when he started the environment officer job in Kehl back in February last year. He was supposed to working on plans to restore habitats and wildlife corridors to protect vulnerable species, like an endangered butterfly native to these parts.
But all that has had to take a back seat. The ants dominate his everyday work now.
He’s essentially the one leading the town’s fight against the ant problem. But where on earth to begin? He hadn’t even heard of Tapinoma magnum before last year. The possibility that ants could create this kind of headache wasn’t on the council’s radar at all.
Gregor Koschate: We didn't know this species – so that made things kind of tricky. We didn't know their strategy, so we didn't know that they were establishing super colonies. Our native ants simply don't do that. And there is currently no specific poison that simply kills the animals. And that’s also why the town of Kehl is calling for more scientific research.
Tapinoma Magnum is native to the Mediterranean region - mainly North Africa. But in recent years the ant has moved into parts of France, Switzerland, the Netherlands – and Germany. They multiply quickly. And they’re difficult to target, Gregor says, because when their nest gets disturbed, they just relocate.
Gregor Koschate: The ants are highly mobile, they are constantly carrying pupae around with them, which means that they are always bringing fresh offspring, perhaps even queens, to new locations to create a new nest there... that's why it's a game of cat and mouse, you fight them on one side and then they simply look for a new place 50 meters away and set up another nest.
In his quest to tackle the ants, Gregor has been in touch with insect experts, university research teams, pest control companies and other city councils. Ideally, he says he would like to see support from the state government, the federal government – or even the EU. Because his town has limited financial resources and expertise. And, he says, it’s not a problem that can be contained by borders.
But higher authorities have declined to get involved. Here's where it gets a little complicated. The state government in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Kehl is located, says help isn’t justified because Tapinoma Magnum doesn’t meet the definition of an invasive species. That is, it hasn’t been proven to be a threat to the local environment.
Gregor says the town feels abandoned.
Gregor Koschate: What more can you say about that? Just speaking as a citizen now there is quite an inherent problem here, which we are not yet familiar with in our Central European everyday life.
What’s happening in Kehl is not an isolated case. Invading alien ants have caused problems in many countries. They can damage infrastructure, attack livestock and crops, sting people, invade homes, and interfere with electricity. And because they often exist in huge colonies, they can also change the dynamics of ecosystems.
Cleo Bertelsmeier: So invasive ants they can have impacts on other insect species, of course, because they can be quite dominant in ecosystems, displace other insects and participate to the general decline of insects that we see worldwide… They can also sometimes attack larger animals like smaller mammals or birds
That’s Cleo Bertelsmeier, a professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne. She an invasive ant expert.
She points out that Tapinoma Magnum isn’t one of the most aggressive invasive species. Like the tiny electric ant, which can inflict a painful sting and is thought to have contributed to the decline of tortoise populations on the Galapagos Islands. Or the yellow crazy ant on Australia’s Christmas Island, which according to scientists has killed tens of millions of iconic red crabs by spraying them with formic acid.
Compared to those cases, Cleo says, Tapinoma Magnum is on the tamer end of the scale. So far, the species seems to mainly be setting up nests in residential areas in Kehl. And while they’re definitely a nuisance for people, it’s not yet clear what ecological impact they might be having.
Because ants are so tiny, it’s easy to overlook what’s going on in their worlds.
We notice when they make annoying trails on the kitchen counter, or become unwelcome picnic guests stealing our crumbs… or when they cause the internet to collapse. But there’s so much about ants we just don’t know.
Like, how could Gregor and the people of Kehl have predicted that a small black ant called Tapinoma Magnum could take root and start multiplying like crazy? That they would establish nests over four hectares?
Ants are complex and incredibly diverse. They can be predators, or prey, practice agriculture, tend gardens, keep pets, and wage wars.
And again, there’s a lot about them still to learn. Like, how many of them even exist?
A few years ago, a team of scientists tried to work that one out.
The number they arrived at was about 2.5 million ants for every human.
Another fun fact: They estimated that if you put all these ants scuttling around on earth together, they would weigh more than all the wild birds and mammals in the world combined.
That’s a lot of ants. And they can have a major influence on the environments they live in.
Tanya Latty: We need ants for everything, you know? The species that people get in their house, those represent only the tiniest fraction of the actual diversity of ants.
That’s Tanya Latty, she’s an entomologist who’s especially interested in insect behavior and ecology. She’s an associate professor at the University of Sydney in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences.
Tanya Latty: There are over 15,000 identified species of ants on the planet. There's probably many, many more, maybe twice as many altogether.
So there are thousands of different types of ants, and they’re all doing different things in their respective habitats.
Tanya Latty: Ants are nature's engineers, so they're building structures, they're helping to aerate the soil in some locations, and they can be really important for that, particularly in arid places. They’re gardeners, they're moving seeds of plants around, you know, forests and grasslands and helping to make sure those plant systems are working…they’re food for other animals, they are predators. I mean, ants do so many different jobs in the ecosystem that it would be terrible without them.
Some ant species have also evolved some pretty cool abilities. Almost like superpowers. Take the incredibly speedy Saharan Silver Ant.
Tanya Latty: The fastest ant we know of can go 100 body lengths per second. So it's like a human being able to run 200 meters per second. So they're just incredibly quick just zipping around. I mean that's real fast.
Ants are known for their super strength – some can carry 50 times their own body weight. Others have impressive hunting techniques…
Tanya Latty: Trapdoor ants can slam their jaws shut at around 137 kilometers per hour. So it's just, it's this incredibly, insanely fast movement they can use to either catch prey or sometimes they use it to bounce themselves away from danger.
… with a force that propels them 8 centimeters into the air! Which is pretty high if you’re a tiny ant.
Tanya Latty: But for me, what makes ants really impressive is the extent to which they're able to do clever things and run this, very complex society, despite the fact that as individuals, they are not terribly intelligent. There's no genius Ant that's kind of directing things while the others follow. They're all equally unintelligent (laughs), and yet despite that, … they've evolved some of these amazing systems
Ants are social insects. They typically live in colonies, and these can be made up of a couple of hundred ants, or have populations in their millions. To keep all these individuals alive - and fed - the colony works like a well-oiled machine. Each ant performs specific roles for the good of the group.
There might be one queen. Or multiple queens. And it’s her job to reproduce – to mate and lay eggs. All the rest of the ants are workers.
Jack Longino: The ants that we interact with, first of all, they're all female, they're all daughters of the queen.
Jack Longino is an ant expert and professor of biology at University of Utah.
Jack Longino: Basically an ant worker is just a stripped down queen… They're just a little scrap of exoskeleton with attitude.
There are male ants, but they have short lives. Their only role is to mate with the queen, and they die not long after that. As for the females, they go through a series of life stages. They start off as a little grub in the nest, and when they become a young adult, they take on the role of babysitter – looking after the eggs and other grubs.
Jack Longino: And then, after it gets a little older, graduates to doing excavation work. And digging tunnels. That might be its first, you know, kind of emergence to the outside world - carrying a bit of dirt out and dumping it outside. And, when they get very old, the last thing they do is they go become a forager, venturing out of the nest to go find food. And those are the ones that you see at your picnic. They're the oldest workers with the shortest time to live because it's dangerous out there.
Ants can spend a lot of time foraging for food to keep their nestmates fed. And this is an activity that often demands team work and communication. They relay and receive information continuously with their sisters - by touching each other with their front feelers, their antennae. And their sense of smell is super important.
Tanya Latty: Let's say an ant finds something really good to eat, she'll come back and she'll essentially vomit in the other ant's mouth, which sounds gross to us, but is great for the other ants, because they get to taste that food and go, ‘Ah! This is the thing I should go out and find.’ And they can go out and look for that scent.
That's the more basic kind, but you can get all the way up to species that have very complex pheromonal communication. So they're communicating with these chemical signals. In some cases that means creating a trail towards food, like a trail of chemical bread crumbs almost.
So once an ant finds something tasty, she turns around, secretes a chemical from her abdomen, and heads back to the nest, leaving a chemical trail so that her sisters can find the food source and help carry it. That’s often what’s going when you see a line of ants seemingly following the same trail. But as Tanya explains, they can also put out chemical signals to warn others that there’s danger.
Tanya Latty: … what we call stop pheromones that say ‘don't come this way, you know, the food is gone, there's danger or something like that.’ They're very difficult to study because we often can't smell them ourselves.
Some species will also have alarm pheromones. So that's a scent that they'll put out that says something bad is happening: ‘Everybody come fight’.
Some ants secure their food supply by “farming.” Leaf cutter ants are a famous example.
Tanya Latty: They're well known for that. You'll see columns of them, you know, walking with little leaves. But they're not eating the leaves.
That’s right, they don’t even eat these leaves. Instead, they mush them up into a paste, and use it as a kind of compost to feed a fungus growing in the nest. And this fungus is what they eat. It’s a symbiotic relationship that’s evolved over millions of years, each one could not survive without the other.
Tanya Latty: And the ants can like tune which leaves to get depending on the nutritional requirements of the fungus. The fungus is also prone to pest species coming in, and bacteria growing. And so the ants themselves produce an antibiotic on their exoskeletons that they can then use to treat the garden…. I mean it's a tremendous operation. So it's agriculture essentially.
And that’s not the only type of “farming” ants have been known to do. Many ant species have also evolved specialized relationships with insects - like aphids - that suck sap from plants and produce sugar that ants love to eat. The ants tend to these sap-sucking bugs like cattle – essentially “milking” them for their sweet honeydew.
Tanya Latty: They'll make sure to protect their little herds of like little sugar cows from predators. And when they need sugar water, they just kind of tap on them and then the insect essentially poops out sugar water that the ants take and that can be their main source of carbohydrates for some of these colonies. So they're super important.
So ants can eat honeydew, seeds, fungi, or dead insects… others are predators … like the army ant. They’re known for carrying out enormous group raids to catch prey in the rainforests of South America. They typically swarm out of the nest in their thousands, branching out to cover an area up to 20 meters wide. On these hunts, they devour anything in their way – usually other insects.
Again, it’s an incredible feat of team work among sisters.
But there can also be conflict in the ant world. Because ant colonies are constantly competing for territory and resources. And things can turn nasty when ants from rival nests meet.
Tanya Latty: Some are very aggressive and will kill everything else in their path. Others are much more timid and will just kind of retreat.
Some species have these really amazing ways of maintaining actual territories. So in Australia we have ants again, the meat ants. And they form enormous colonies, the boundaries between colonies… are defended initially through dances. So the workers will line up along the territorial boundary and do this little like wavy dance thing. And the others will wave back. And if one colony is stronger than the others will sort of back off and let them push out their lines. And it's only if that kind of fails, they actually physically fight. They try to dance it out first, which I think is amazing… but some species will just go straight to war, so it really depends on the species.
If all-out war breaks out, worker ants can sting, spray poison, or bite each other on the battlefield. It’s a fight to the death. Ants at war have also been observed tending to their sisters injured in the fighting, for example by amputating a wounded leg.
Tanya Latty: There's other cases where ants will go on to sort of a battlefield and they'll bring home the ants that are injured enough that they have some chance of recovery. And they seem to be able to make those kind of judgement calls, which is really fascinating.
But ants from different nests don’t always see each other as enemies. In fact, there’s a phenomenon that can lead to territorial boundaries dissolving altogether. With ants moving freely from nest to nest, and cooperating with each other to collect food and take care of the brood.
This is what’s known as a super colony. They typically cover a large area, with many connected nests and many many queens.
The biggest known super colony is here in Europe - it’s in the Guinness Book of World Records. It stretches 6000 kilometers - from northern Italy, through France and along the south of Spain to Portugal. The colony belongs to the Argentine ant, a species that’s believed to have been introduced in the first half of the 20th century from South America.
Ant species that are capable of forming these super colonies also tend to be invasive, Tanya says, because they can multiply very quickly, and are difficult to eradicate.
Tanya Latty: Those species that can form super colonies can usually produce hundreds of queens, so it's not like you just need to kill 1 queen. They've got backup Queens, you know, as far as the eye can see.
Gregor Koschate: So, this is where the colony actually ends, more or less... We had a real hotspot right here…
Back in Kehl, a super-colony is exactly what Gregor Koschate is dealing with. In fact, Tapinoma Magnum now has two super colonies in the area.
Gregor Koschate: I'm guessing we have about 4-5 main nests, maybe 10 per colony. A nest doesn't just have one queen, but several. And the literature assumes up to several 100 queens per super-colony and over 100,000,000 workers. It's quite powerful.
We’ve come to a playground in Kehl’s south that’s been fenced off. This is one of the places the ants took over. We go inside through a gap in the barriers to have a look.
Something that jumps out straight away are little holes in the ground, about 2-3 centimeters wide, next to patches of what look like burnt grass. But these aren’t from the ants. They’re the result of the town’s fight against the ants.
To try to get the ant population down, Kehl city council has started using a lance-like tool that blasts huge amounts of hot water and foam into the earth. It’s the same stuff used in organic farming to fight weeds. The tool can penetrate the ground at a depth of around 1 meter – deep enough to get to the ant nests, and most importantly, to kill the queens that are producing all the eggs, Gregor says.
Gregor Koschate: You can see it when you ram this lance into the ground and then 200-300 liters of hot water really go into the ground, then you just see the eggs that are washed out...The queens are also there and they are simply flushed out.
He estimates that this operation is costing the community up to €70,000 a year.
Gregor Koschate: We’re just starting to combat them regularly and we're seeing the first successes… So they haven't disappeared, but they're very much reduced.
It’s true, there aren’t many ants visible in this playground. At least there are no highways or dense black clumps of them.
Gregor Koschate: That was also one of the hotspots here. It was extremely bad here... There was a huge colony in there …You can hardly see anything anymore. There are still a few running around, but that's almost nothing. And in general, I would say that it has been reduced by at least half, if not two thirds, so you have to look at it that way.
Gregor points to a small patch of churned up soil – a possible ant nest. He scratches the surface with the stick and suddenly chaos breaks out. Hundreds of ants scurry out of the earth within a matter of seconds - like an eruption. Some of them carry eggs and pupae as they rush to find shelter.
Gregor Koschate: And you see, we've just created a bit of panic in the nest. You can see immediately how maybe 200-300 ants - not enormous, but clearly some of them - are now taking the entire brood to safety. They are very distressed and are now cleaning up, so to speak, and moving elsewhere.
A woman comes out of an apartment block and tells Gregor there are more ants over there, in the building’s car port. He tells her they’re doing their best.
It's one thing to spray hot water into the relatively soft ground of a park – but what about the ants that have made themselves at home in people’s private gardens or under pavements? They’re harder to get to.
Gregor Koschate: Right now we are trying to buy time with hot water and reduce the number of ants. And it's clear to us that we're not going to eradicate them for good in these areas, but we need to contain them at least…
…Things used to be pretty bad here and so it’s always a sense of achievement when you bring the numbers down but then the next day it’s like , oh my God, they're back again. So it's also a bit of an up and down experience.
Tapinoma Magnum is just one of the hundreds of ant species that have ended up in new territory. And because such invasions are closely tied to global trade and travel, it’s a problem that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
At least 520 species of ants have now been found in places they weren’t supposed to be, according to scientists. And around 20 species are considered to be particularly invasive - meaning they have a negative impact on the environment and economy.
Some of the most common examples are the African big-headed ant, the yellow crazy ant, the red-imported fire ant, and the Argentine ant – that’s the one with the biggest known super-colony in the world.
Between 1930 and 2021, invasive ants caused an estimated $51 billion in economic losses – according to a study from 2022.
At the same time, the number of ant species reported as invasive is steadily increasing. Here’s Cleo Bertelsmeier again, the invasive ant expert from Switzerland.
Cleo Bertelsmeier: We found that this really has started to become very frequent in the 19th century, with globalization, with the construction of more and more railways. Faster transportation and the industrial revolution and higher levels of trade worldwide.
Cleo says Tapinoma Magnum probably reached Kehl, in Germany, by stowing away in the soil of potted plants, like palm or olive trees, imported from the Mediterranean area.
Once the ants are planted in the ground and establish their nests, they can spread quickly, she says, so it’s important to detect the problem early.
Cleo Bertelsmeier: I think it's like things like cancer, it's really the prevention stages are crucial and once it proliferates, then you can try to mitigate the invasion, try to bring it down, but you're not going to get rid of it. If you have something that covers a few hectares, it's very, very difficult to deal with that.
Some ant super-colonies have collapsed on their own because of a parasite or fungus that spread among the workers. In other cases, humans have intervened with biocontrol programs, or toxic bait. What will work depends on the species and the location.
Ideally, Cleo says, there should be measures in place to prevent invasions from happening in the first place. Such as, quarantining plant pots in nurseries to make sure they don’t have potentially harmful ants in the soil. Or more thorough checks at borders. Part of the issue is, of course, ants are tiny. They can slip through undetected. But they’re not always secret hitch-hikers. Quite the opposite. Cleo says invasive ants are often transported to other locations deliberately.
Cleo Bertelsmeier: There's also a pet trade in ants, which I really didn't believe when I started working on this topic. But it seems that there's more and more people who are passionate about ant keeping. What we see is that there's more and more people who want quite exotic species from another continent and this is something which is totally not regulated, so you can buy whatever insect species from wherever in the world. And it gets shipped by post.
All it takes is a quick online search, a few clicks. And the ants can be sent to your door. The package includes a queen, and a few dozen workers. According to Cleo, keeping ants as pets is no short-term commitment, because ant queens can live years – even up to three decades in some cases.
Cleo Bertelsmeier: What happens is, yeah, people obviously buy it for their kids or so on and then they get bored with it and release the ants in nature. So we looked in online stores and we found you can buy more than 600 species of ants, and some of the worst invasive species in the world.
Human behavior is driving biodiversity loss worldwide… and despite their great numbers, ants are not immune from this crisis.
Researchers looking at how wildlife responds to alien ants have estimated that the number of individual animals and species on average dropped by half in areas invaded by ants. Birds, reptiles, butterflies and beetles were often hard-hit. But the group that was worst off?
Native ants.
That’s because they’re competing for food and resources, and they may even be directly attacked by their invasive rivals. Over time, they may be driven away or wiped out altogether.
So one of the biggest threats facing ants, is … other ants.
But there’s also climate change and habitat destruction.
Given that ants play such an important role as ecosystem engineers, Tanya Latty at the University of Sydney says such threats to their survival should be taken seriously.
Tanya Latty: We often think of things as being like, oh, you can never have an ant be vulnerable to anything because there's so many of them. But not all of them are like that. Some have quite small colonies. Some of them have very tight relationships with particular plants. And if those interactions go awry, then we lose that species… It's also worth pointing out that we don't actually know that much about ants at the end of the day. Like, considering how many different species there are, there's not enough of us studying them.
Documenting the ants that are out there - before it’s too late - is what drives Jack Longino. Remember, he’s the professor of biology from Utah who we heard from earlier in the episode. He says he sees mapping the incredible diversity of the ant world as a higher calling. It’s what he’s spent most of his career doing. His students even call him Ant Man on campus.
Jack Longino: It’s unusual to be an ant specialist. And so all this ant kitsch comes to me, you know, I get ant tablecloths and ant paperweights and, you know, people give me all this stuff and they send me posters, you know, for Ant Man.
Jack is part of the Ants of the World Project, which aims to create a DNA map of ant species. They’ve been drawing on specimens in ant collections around the globe to put together this tree of life… and the hope is it might be able to provide insights into how ants have responded to previous climate shifts, or how species diversified on different continents.
Jack Longino: We do live on this incredibly beautiful planet and we know all these species, you know, the elephants and the panda bears and my world of weird, bizarre ants. We’re looking at things that took maybe 50 to 100 million years to diversify. And that's a long time. And, we all know that we humans are this new weird kind of species that's appeared. We're, we're definitely a game changer on the planet.
Jack sees the conversion of habitats – whether grassland or forest or desert - as the main cause for concern for ant species.
And then there’s climate change. He’s studied how ants that live at certain elevations in the American tropics might be affected by rising temperatures. And for some of them, the outlook isn’t good.
Jack Longino: The ones I'm most concerned about are the ones that are on the tops of mountains now, and they’ve evolved to be specialized for those higher elevational zones - where it's colder - and they’re going to run off the top of the mountain, they won't have anywhere to go.
Cleo, our invasive species expert, says climate change could also give invasive species a boost.
Cleo Bertelsmeier: So some of them will proliferate more. Many ant species, they come from the tropics, from the subtropics, from Mediterranean areas. And for those species it will be much easier to invade places in temperate Europe, like here in Switzerland, Germany, northern France. So these areas are expected to see an increase in invasive ant species.
That’s bad news for Gregor and the town of Kehl. He’s resigned to the fact that people will probably have to learn to live with the ants for the foreseeable future.
Gregor Koschate: The only thing we can ensure is that it doesn’t become unbearable and that the ants are significantly reduced. But I think this will be a widespread problem in Germany in 5-10 years.
Walking back from the playground, we pass a man bending down, spraying his garden wall. When we ask what he’s doing, he simply holds up a can that says “Ant Spray.”
Gregor apologetically tells him that they’re doing all they can, and they’re hoping to soon get approval to help tackle invasions in private homes as well.
The sooner the ants are under control, the sooner he can get back to the job he’d rather be doing – working to protect the region’s habitats, like the nearby wetlands along the River Rhine, and the species that live there.
But for that to happen, he says they need more support from outside, and more research into a solution for the ant problem.
Gregor Koschate: My hope for the next 2 to 3 years would actually be to see this being addresses at a federal level or possibly even at a European level. That this problem is taken seriously and that the local authorities receive appropriate support and that scientists find a solution this problem. Insects are small so that they tend to be ignored, but if it were crocodiles swimming in the Rhine, it would probably be different, and the authorities would act faster.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Living Planet. It was produced by Natalie Muller and edited and mixed by me, Neil King. Our sound engineer was Leon Novak. If you're enjoying Living Planet, why not take a moment to give it a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whichever other app will let you do that and tell someone about us. It really makes a difference. You can also find us on YouTube at DW Podcasts. And if you have any feedback or a topic you’d like us to cover, please do write us or send us a voice message to livingplanet@dw.com. Living Planet is brought to you by DW in Bonn, Germany.