Who needs pesticides when you have behavioral conditioning?

Every summer we get some ants in the apartment. We’re on the ground floor, so no big surprise. For the most part they wander around like dehydrated festival ghouls looking for the acid tent, but we usually keep up with the housekeeping well enough so that they don’t find anything of interest and wander back outside out of boredom, if not sheer ennuis. But the other day…

Oh, the other day it was a little messy in the kitchen. We’d had a busy birthday weekend and we were behind on the dishes. There was a pot of spaghetti sauce soaking in the sink, and some disgustingly orange greasy spillover that hadn’t been rinsed down the sink from the night before. My friends, we left them a feast. The sink was crawling with ants, tons of the little festival-going bastards. They had jumped the fences. It was anarchy! Not a one of them had bought a weekend pass! Day passes, at best, and most of those were counterfeit, no doubt.

So naturally I washed them down the sink and squashed the rest by hand with a paper towel. Complete annihilation, followed by clean-up of the offending mess, catch up on dishes, all is well and the kingdom is at peace.

Ok, but they keep showing up. The next few days I see a few, sometimes a few dozen, coming back in the same specific area with their dazed and confused affectation (like they’re fooling anyone). A lot of times they’re checking out the sink again. (The clean sink, morons.)

Now, I know some things about ants from my time as a licensed pest control operator and my lifelong history of being a nerd, so I figure these ants are just foraging along scent trails. See, when they find food they lay down a scent trail as they take it back to the nest. Other ants follow, if it’s a good lead they endorse it by adding their own pheromones, strengthening the scent trail. Stronger trail=better food source=send more ants! Even with the mess cleaned up, they’re still checking on that sweet stash they found the other day, cause maybe there’s food again for some reason? They don’t know how things work, they’re ants. To be fair, they could end up being right, because I don’t like doing the dishes.

So I want to use this against them. They want to send curious foragers down the path to my house? Fine. NO MERCY. Terminate All Ants On Sight. I want to change their understanding of this scent trail. I want there to be a road sign back at their hive that reads “Greasy Georgie’s Smorgasbord” crossed out with a tiny dead ant skull and crossed tarsals and a squirt of pheremone that means “This Path Leads To Death”.

And so far, it’s working. MWAHAHAHA!!! Decreasing number of ants seen since starting my scorched earth policy, zero in the last 24 hours. Now all I have to do is make sure dirty dishes never pile up, ever again…oh, dammit.

If you’re still here, I found this article while trying to confirm that I can call ant forearms “tarsals”. This team, Thomas Endlein and Walter Federle from the Max Planck Institute and University of Cambridge, respectively, engineered this super cool force transducer for measuring the friction forces of the hairs on an ants feet! Sheer madness! I looked over their methods and I definitely understand most of the words, if not the, er, specific or contextual meaning. Anyway, if any of that sounds interesting, take a look, it seems like some really clever engineering and math to collect the data and then test it experimentally.

On Heels and Toes: How Ants Climb with Adhesive Pads and Tarsal Friction Hair Arrays