Ants are as Effective as Pesticides
scitech.au.dk
scitech.au.dk
It's taken a long time for us to take this approach to intestinal flora and skin bacteria -- we need to think this way about everything.
There's a great book on this kind of thing: "Common Sense Pest Control".
The solution was:
1. get rid of all rotting wood near the house 2. make the deck out of concrete and iron 3. make sure no vegetation touches the house 4. roof overhangs that keep the exterior wood dry
and lastly, just to be sure, the bug guy comes and sprays a Line of Death around the perimeter once a month :-)
The idea is to not create an environment that is attractive to pests. For example, I also had a yellowjacket problem. I eventually was told that they loved cedar shingles. Replaced the shingles with asphalt ones, and no more yellowjackets.
We tend to get Argentine ants in the Bay Area and they do attract spiders, but they also keep down the cockroach population. So there are arguments for and against keeping them.
"Photonic Fence can kill up to 50 to 100 mosquitoes a second, at a maximum range of 100 ft" - now that's pretty awesome!
Doesn't it seem more likely they developed and patented this and are waiting for someone else to infringe on their patent, rather than them ever actually creating a product?
This is a perfect example of how broken our patent system is. We have a technology that absolutely has demand, but it will never be produced because it's more profitable to abuse our patent system in the courts than it is to actually manufacture and sell a product.
For those wondering about fire insurance, its not a long distance thing, its a camera looking down on a region about 1' x 1' of light colored paving tiles (ceramic). The entire apparatus would sit about 3' off the tiles (to give enough x and y control over the beam) The tiles are not reflective relative to IR but I've got IR screens anyway (I suppose an ant could try to carry a mirror if you watch horror movies)
The situation with the native species of Hawaii is actually much worse than most people are aware -- even people who live in Hawaii. I read somewhere[1] that, if you walk around a typical coastal town in Hawaii, and look at the lawns & gardens & parks, and watch the birds & whatnot, that you will generally not see any native species at all. The ones big enough to see are all confined to the interior.
EDIT. And, by the way, the rats weren't native, either. Hawaii has exactly two native mammals: the Hawaiian Hoary Bat and the Hawaiian Monk Seal.
[1] I think it was in Remains of a Rainbow, by D. Liittschwager & S. Middleton. https://amazon.com/dp/0792264126/
Speaking of ants that live in trees, the Big Island is being overrun by the Little Fire Ant, which has already spread across much of the rainy side. I'm sure it protects the trees from pests, too, but in this case that unfortunately also includes humans. They have a nasty bite, and are very hard to control, which is making farming in infested areas hell. http://littlefireants.com/
That's simply not true. I'm not so familiar with the fauna of Hawaii, but you can consider the moa which was happily ensconced in New Zealand for about 20 million years, and extinct within 200 years of the Polynesian settlement in the late 13th century. It's pretty clear to me in a situation like that what was native and who the invaders were, and I'd be surprised if the situation in Hawaii were very different.
New Zealand was part of Gondwanaland, and became isolated by continental drift. Anything living there when the islands became separated from the rest of the supercontinent is native.
Hawaii is a bunch of volcanoes that sprung out of the middle of the ocean. There were no land animals on the islands when they first became islands.
Now, that's a slightly topsy-turvy definition of native, which (etymologically) should mean any species that came into existence on the island.
* Indigenous - it got there without any human intervention.
* Endemic - it is not found anywhere else.
We should be thinking in terms of systems not silver bullets. Lots of farms do this and it's honestly not that hard, it just requires knowledge, process, and some diligence. But we've been defaulting toward auto-pilot agriculture for so long that it's a bit of a dramatic shift.
Ants are cool and all, but they're also jerks, and I find much satisfaction in the latest trend of pouring molten metal into anthills to make artwork.
With results like these, there must be some reason why this was not discovered and put to widespread use already. What are is down side? Containment? How to keep them from spreading to unwanted areas, like the farm house?
You can't take fruit between some areas in Australia because of the risk of fruit flies - I wouldn't be so quick to write off the possibility that certain species of ants might carry a similar risk. Northern Queensland certainly has some nasty ants that we don't have in the more southern states.
It's not like ants have a completely clean record there either:
I guess the biggest obstacles are the cultural ones.
What about just using their DNA?
I <3 ants: https://twitter.com/ultimape/status/586512292403093505
Anyways the weaver Ant is endemic to places that are not just the tropics, they've been used on citrus plants in China since 400 AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaver_ant
Some ants farm aphids for their honeydew. Rather than destroying them, they encourage their population on the growing-tips of plants. If you introduce aphid-eating insects, such as ladybirds or lacewings, the ants will fight off the attackers.
https://www.creaturecontrol.net/insect-pest-control/asian-la...
Asian ladybugs are no more effective at dealing with aphids, but they are easier to farm. So you'll unfortunately get them when mail-ordering.
Edit: Used boiling water to take out the nest, then sprinkled a mix of potato starch with fine ground sugar around. I don't want to much poison on and around my fruit trees.
And yes: up to 6 ladybugs had a party in that tree for three consecutive days. I read somewhere that each of them can munch up to 100 aphids a day so I guess there was quite a few to start with.
And although I agree with many of the other posters here that one has to be extremely careful with biological pest control when using imported species, I still think that on the whole this approach is definitely better than poisoning the ecosystem with chemicals. Of course one has to do one's homework first, thoroughly, to avoid "Hawaiian mongoose disasters". But after that has been done, let's go for it!