The invasive red fire ant is one of the most feared invasive ants in the world today and has spread to many parts of North America, Asia and Australia. With amazing competitiveness and adaptability, they are often able to quickly establish strong ecological advantages everywhere they go, crowding out and replacing native ant species and arthropods, ultimately causing a serious decline in the biodiversity of local ecosystems.
In the face of this grim situation, many ant experts are studying the competitive relationship between native ants and red fire ants, hoping to find some local ant species that can compete with red fire ants, so as to optimize the control strategy of red fire ants and inhibit the spread of red fire ants.
Red fire ants
<h1>The result of the confrontation between 18 species of ants and red fire ants</h1>
Regarding the interspecific confrontation of ants, Zoology has read many papers and found that even in the same number, red fire ants can often easily defeat other ants, so which ants can beat red fire ants in the same number, and if red fire ants encounter marching ants, what will be the outcome? With regard to these questions, we will begin today with Florida in the southeastern United States.
In order to explore the ability of local ants to fight against red fire ants, scholars have studied the antagonistic relationship between red fire ants and 18 common local ant species. The specific test is: a certain number of red fire ants and another ant in two plastic plates, and then use a rubber hose to connect the two to a plastic plate in the middle, when the hose switch is turned on, both ants can enter the center plate, which is the main battlefield of ants.
After a period of time, scholars need to count the number of deaths on both sides. The statistics of dead individuals were critical to the study as a whole, as the ratio of the number of deaths between the two sides (native ants in front and red fire ants in the back) can be quantified as an index of interspecies confrontation. When the antagonism index is greater than 1, it means that the ant's combat effectiveness is relatively weak in the face of the red fire ant, and when the ant ant index is less than 1, it indicates that the ant species has a better ability to resist. This concept is easy to understand, just like the exchange ratio or battle loss ratio often mentioned in human warfare, let's look at the confrontation index of these 18 species of ants.
If we look at this table, we can see that 13 of the 18 native ants are obviously not opponents of the red fire ants, and the remaining 5 species have a significantly lower number of casualties in battle than the red fire ants, indicating that they do have extraordinary combat effectiveness. Among the ants with a battle loss ratio higher than 1, the Swift Ant and the Tropical Fire Ant played a better role, and their battle loss ratio was slightly more than 2. The number of deaths of bowback ants and big-headed ants is about 4 to 5 times that of red fire ants, and the exchange ratio of several ants is close to ten times or even more than ten or twenty times, and it is not difficult for us to imagine that it must be a scene of collapse at a touch and defeat.
<h1>This marching ant is beaten by red fire ants</h1>
Among these opponents with a confrontation index higher than 1, it is worth noting that one of the marching ants, the dark-breasted Neva ant, comes from the genus Neva Ants of the subfamily Marching Ants, which contains 129 species, making it the most abundant and widely distributed of the New World Marching Ants. The dark-breasted Neva ants are found in the southern United States and Central America, with a body length of 2.2 to 4.6 mm, and tens of thousands of worker ants in the colony as their external conquest force, mainly feeding on other ants and rifles.
Dark-breasted Neva Ant
However, in the confrontation test, the dark-breasted Neva ant performed very poorly, with a total of 475 worker ants killed, but only the red fire ants lost 77 worker ants, with an exchange ratio of 6.2:1.
In the wild, the number of worker ants in the dark-breasted Neva ant colony is not as large as that of the red fire ant, and the combat effectiveness of the same number is obviously inferior to that of the red fire ant, so this marching ant is difficult to use as a biological factor to inhibit the mature colony of the red fire ant.
Nevertheless, we must not say that no marching ant can defeat the invading red fire ant, because the marching ant subfamily contains 26 genera, as many as 813 species, in the New World, at least the Zoological Records wrote about the Ai's man ant, its strength is likely to be above the red fire ant.
The dark-breasted Neva ant transports eggs
In addition, there are many cases of restraint in the interspecific relationships of ants. For example, another invasive ant that expands rapidly and is very harmful, the small fire ant, has another member of the genus Neiva ant (flattened Neva ant) in its native area that specializes in preying on it. The flat knot neva ants do not even need to fight when attacking the nest of small fire ants, just releasing pheromones can make the small fire ant worker ants panic and leave the nest, and the small fire ants that are usually majestic can be said to be restrained without temper. Therefore, among the marching ants that are rarely studied and lack ecological information, it is difficult to say whether there are any special red fire ants.
<h1>The Big-toothed Ant challenged more than 2 times as many red fire ants and won a big victory</h1>
Speaking of the best-performing native ants, it is the brown large-toothed mammoth from the genus Macrocephalus, which, when faced with 2 times the number of red fire ants, lost 107 in battle, but the red fire ants paid a heavy price of 562 worker ants, playing a battle loss ratio of nearly 1 to 5, which is unattainable for the other 17 species of ants.
Big-toothed raptor ant
The reason why it is so strong is first of all because of its huge size, the average body length of the large-toothed worker ant is 8 mm, compared to the average of 3.84 mm of worker ants of all levels of red fire ants, and only large worker ants can exceed 5 mm. What's more, the disproportionately large jaws of the big-toothed ants can reach incredible speeds when attacking. Studies have pointed out that another member of the genus Macrolodontidae, the Big-toothed Mammoth ant, Its closed jaw reaches a speed of 64.3 meters per second, about 231.5 kilometers per hour (this bite speed holds the highest record in the animal kingdom for more than a decade, until last year it was broken by the Camilla's 324 km/h speed), so the impact force generated at such a high speed is 371 to 504 times the weight of the ant, which can cause serious damage to the prey, and the structure of the brown giant-toothed ant is similar to that of the Bao's big-toothed ant, and the fauna estimates that its attack speed should be not far away.
This was also demonstrated in battle, with the brown-toothed ants able to use their jaws to shoot red fire ants up to 35 centimeters away. However, interestingly, although the brown big-toothed ants are completely superior to the red fire ants, there are observations that when they encounter the Brinell cone odor ants, due to the irritating odor released by the latter, the large-toothed ants will always retreat in a hurry, and we will look at the poor performance of the Brinell cone ants when facing the red fire ants - 10 Brinell cone ants can replace a red fire ant, and we can find that there is a cyclical restraint in this.
Although the brown giant-toothed ants are highly effective, their colony number is generally only a few tens to a few hundred, and they are helpless in the face of tens of thousands of mature colonies of red fire ants, and it is likely to take advantage of small groups of red fire ants.
<h1>Three species of pan-bellied ants defeat red fire ants with chemical weapons</h1>
The three species of the genus Pan-abdomen, the Ashipanitone ant, the Texas Pan-bellied Ant and the Tennessee Disc-bellied Ant, perform well in the conflict with the red fire ant, and the exchange ratio is one for two or even one for three, what is the secret of their success? In terms of body size, the members of the genus Pan-ventral Ants are generally not small, with the Worker Ants of the Ashipanic Ants being larger, generally 7 to 8 mm long, the large worker ants of the Texas Disc-bellied Ants exceeding 5.5 mm, and the Tennessee Disc-ventral Ants being 6 to 6.6 mm long. More critically, the chemical weapons of the pan-bellied ants are very powerful, and when dealing with red fire ants, their killing method is to stab the fire ants with a chelated needle at the end of the abdomen and inject venom, and its venom can have a significant killing effect on the red fire ants. The worker ant of the red fire ant will die immediately as long as it is stung by the claw needle of the coiled ant a second time, and if it is only stung once, it can recover after 10 to 20 minutes of paralysis.
Despite their strength, the number of worker ants in the pan-abdomen ant colony is not very large, with only a few hundred worker ants in the Texas pan-abdomen ant and the Ashi-plated ant, and hundreds to thousands of tennessee disc-bellied ants, so it is difficult to expect them to be able to compete with the mature red fire ant colony. But it should be feasible to clean up the new or small colonies of red fire ants, after all, Florida pan-belly ants have been observed to attack the new queen of red fire ants.
Apannateratum
Those species with a resistance index less than 1 often occupy different habitats from red fire ants, such as the North American pan-belly ant, although distributed in all habitats, but they especially prefer forest ecosystems, while red fire ants are less fond of woodland, perhaps forming a balance after long-term interaction and substitution. In response to this situation, in order to control the red fire ant, some scholars have proposed a scheme, that is, artificially design an animal community, and introduce a strong ant species that is strong enough to resist the red fire ant as its competitor in the invaded area, such as the more powerful ant species in this article. Of course, this approach can be very dangerous, and it must be ensured that introduced species do not create ecological disasters like the red fire ant, and in the future, rigorous behavioral, ecological and systematic studies of these ant species will also be required.
Although some species of ants can defeat the red fire ant in a fair contest of equal numbers, their natural communities are too small and live in different habitats from the red fire ants, which is difficult to control the red fire ants in the wild. It seems that the red fire ant can invade several continents and flood to such an extent, there is indeed a strong point.
There is also an ant called the new black hair ant in the table that can also defeat the red fire ant, the zoology has been talked about before, please read: the new black hair ant war ten times more red fire ants