They often show up as uninvited guests at picnics, but ants deserve more than being on the receiving end of aerosol spray.
Ants are known for their big appetites, and now, these common critters are being touted as topnotch cleaning crews. In a study published in Global Change Biology, North Carolina State University researchers have found that arthropods such as beetles, mites, and especially pavement ants can take an impressive chunk out of New York City’s food litter.
As CBS News reports, the team set up testing sites with hot dogs, cookies and potato chips in 24 medians (a grassy strip in the middle or side of the road) along West Street, Broadway and 11th and 12th Avenues in west Manhattan, and at 21 sites in city parks. Each site had two samples of junk food: one was caged so only arthropods could access it; the other was cage-free to allow arthropods, as well as larger animals such as rats and pigeons, to feast.
The result? Fast Company notes that after 24 hours, the team found that the arthropods alone guzzled 32 percent of the caged food. Animals, including arthropods, ate 80 percent of the non-caged food.
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“We calculate that the arthropods on medians down the Broadway/West St. corridor alone could consume more than 2,100 pounds of discarded junk food every year, assuming they take a break in the winter,” says Elsa Youngsteadt, a research associate at North Carolina State and the study’s lead author. That’s the equivalent of 60,000 hot dogs, 200,000 cookies and 600,000 potato chips — and that’s just on Broadway.
If used effectively, ants might be able to take a bite out of the country’s cleaning bill. It costs $11.5 billion each year to clean up America’s litter, with food remnants making up 20 percent of the trash.
Not only that, Youngsteadt adds that the little scavengers can help starve out the populations of larger, disease carrying vermin. “This means that ants and rats are competing to eat human garbage, and whatever the ants eat isn’t available for the rats,” she said. “The ants aren’t just helping to clean up our cities, but to limit populations of rats and other pests.”
And for you litterbugs out there, the researcher points out that this doesn’t mean we should “feed ants on purpose.”
DON’T MISS: Do Ants Hold the Key to Reducing Pollution?
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Do Ants Hold the Key to Reducing Pollution?
Ants — some bite, some eat wood and others just come crawling when there’s food left out on the counter. Turns out, however, that these insects (that most of us find downright annoying) could be helpful in reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
How so?
A recent study from Arizona State University, conducted by geology professor Ronald Dorn, found that the presence of ants can cause certain rocks to capture carbon dioxide, therefore preventing it from going into the atmosphere. This CO2 absorption isn’t small either. Ants can increase the natural amount a rock takes in by up to 335 times.
What’s the secret to this powerful partnership? Well, even Dorn doesn’t quite seem to know yet. In fact, he basically discovered the connection by accident. Back in the early 1990s, he was conducting a study about the weathering of minerals, and one of the rocks he was studying happened to become ant-infested. The bugs were annoying to him, pouring out whenever he tried to drill for a sample. Over time, however, he realized their effect on capturing carbon dioxide.
Even without the help of insects, though, rocks absorb a lot of carbon from the air.
The dangerous polluter seeps into calcium and magnesium deposits found in many rocks, which then transforms into limestone or dolomite. If it weren’t for rocks taking in carbon, our earth would be a whole lot warmer and air dirtier than it already is.
“When I take students on field trips, I make them kiss the limestone, because that limestone is just CO2 that’s just locked up in rocks and how Earth has remained habitable,” Dorn told Scientific American.
With carbon-rich rock already having contributed so much to our environment, the effect of ants speeding up the process could be huge. After all, there’s an estimated 10 trillion of the tiny insects on earth at our disposal. Even better would be if researchers could figure out exactly what the ants do to the rock to make it absorb carbon faster. Then, the solution could be mass-produced.
Until that’s the case, we’ll just have to settle for welcoming ants into our yards and enjoying our little patch of cleaner air.
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