I read this from somewhere before.. Want to share with everyone here..
Everyone knows ants are a nuisance and hopes that they will go away.. The truth is the more you hope they will go away, the more they will come. Even when there is no more food on your table, they will still come.
While ants are very simple-minded, we all know that ants have some global intelligence.. They can tell their fellow ants where food is and soon you will see a lot of ants circling around the food..
Well, an amazing fact i read in the book is that the more ants you kill on your table, the more will come.. The amazing part is the precise number of ants that will come back.. If you kill one scavenging ant, exactly two will return to haunt you the next day. If you kill the two, then four will return the following day. If you kill the four, eight will return..
All the ants behave the same universally.. From my home, my school, from Singapore, from USA, they all behave the same way.. You kill one, two will return the next day.. If you leave it alone, it will just be a lone ant for many days doing its rounds to find food..
The moral of the story is don't kill the ants on your table. Keep it clean and they will give up after several days.
Anybody knows why? Why is it that you kill one ant, two ants will come back to haunt you? 
(I will post the answer to this question later on.. 
)
Last edited by thiamshui on Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:11 pm; edited 1 time in total ohhh...i didn't know that...Thanks for sharing...
I've always been fond of just leaving some duct tape sticky side up, then you come back later to find the stuck critters.
However, this theory is flawed, if you keep killing all the ants that come, you'll soon be killing thousands of ants per day. Eventually there will be no more ants.
the queen lays millions per day. Pheremores i think, 2 parts Mix clorox with one part a amonia, stand back(posion gas) and wipe up the dead bodies, the salt in the mixture removes the pheremonres and the rest just killes the ants, for those that like to kill ants (like me, im phobic)
I had some problems with them a few weeks ago. I sealed their holes with silicon gel (or whatever it is called in English - it is used in bathrooms, etc). Actually they had surprisingly lot of "emergency exits": I kept sealing them for more than a week! At the end some of them couldn't return to the hole. I killed the winged ones (they are fertile), and counted the others. Actually they are getting less now...
By the way, they were really big ones - around 1 cm long. Queen-to-be-s almost 2!!!! What I know is an ant leaves some sort of secretion behind as it walks. It serves as trace to find way back and also as trace for other ants to follow. May be that is how they follow.
Now as to why they do that-
May be just the genetic program in their brains.
like terrorist increasing their attacks on US as US keeps on killing them.
just a joke. | amicalindia wrote: |
What I know is an ant leaves some sort of secretion behind as it walks. It serves as trace to find way back and also as trace for other ants to follow. May be that is how they follow.
Now as to why they do that-
May be just the genetic program in their brains.
like terrorist increasing their attacks on US as US keeps on killing them.
just a joke. |
I am NOT an expert, but in the back of my mind I figured that the ants were laying a chemical trail as they went looking for food. If nothing was found, on the way back they marked the "trail" as nonproductive. When we kill them, they can't mark the trail nonproductive, so other ants follow it looking for the food.
Any real entomylogists out there who can tear this theory to shreds? 
| Quote: |
| However, this theory is flawed, if you keep killing all the ants that come, you'll soon be killing thousands of ants per day. Eventually there will be no more ants. |
Hmm.. You won't kill thousands of ants per day.. This is because you will lose count of how many ants will 'come back for revenge' after killing a few because you would have to look all over the table, under the books, under the cups, to count all of them.. But they are that precise..
How can this theory be? The ant is dead, cleaned from the table, how can it tell the other ants to come? This 'ghost power' is very useful for the ant community because it is telling the rest of the ants that there must be food out there where their fellow ant is killed. What other reasons will an ant be killed? Not a lot. But why only two return but not the whole nest?
Well, it is not necessary for the whole nest to come unless they know for sure there is a lot of food, and this is obvious to all of us.. When one ant is killed, two are sent to check that there is food is a good practice.. The queen ant is the only one with the intelligence to make such a decision..
Every night, the ants will go back to 'report' to the queen ant its findings.. If a poor ant is killed by you and does not return, the queen ant would know by that night.. The next day, she will command two idle ants, give them the scent of the dead and send them out.
These two ants will follow the tracks of the dead ant following its scent to your table.. If they find the corpse of the dead ant, they will carry it back as food, no point wasting it.. If you don't kill them, it will come back everyday to beg for food from you.. If you kill the two, the queen will miss them that night again and she will send four..
So, if you kill eight, must the queen ant know how to do multiplication, 8x2=16? No.. She only needs to know 1x2=2.. For every ant that does not return, she just passes over the scent to two idle ant.. She doesn't care if the missing eight ants are from your table..interesting ! i will try..I think you is right. I am wondering why ant allways there on my table even I kill it and cleaning my table before.
Don't ants out-weigh humans by like 10 to 1?
ANTS ARE SO CREEPY!!!! Let me tell you about my friends recent experience lol..
a while after moving into a new apt, once summer began he came across an ant or two.. killed them and mocked them and their intelligence and proceeded challenge the dead ant corpses to send all of their friends after him for he is mightier than they. ahaha..BIG MISTAKE..
Now first things first these are no ordinary ants, it's almost like every one of them is a mini-queen, EVERY ONE of them spanning at least 2-3 cm in length. Oh they crunched good. And were quick. and everywhere. It became so bad that he was afraid to sleep and was constantly looking around the room for them!
Every time I was over I only came across a few if that and only heard of his horror stories and laughed calling him a sketchbag and maybe there really are no ants just to bug him. Until one day I visited and he wanted me to get him a spoon from his kitchen cuz he was afraid to go in it. He's like 'yeah go look! you see for yourself! go on i dare you!' I just laughed and happily took on the oppurtunity..
So I walk into his gloomy dark and creepy kitchen.. take a few steps in thinking this isnt so bad and stop dead in my tracks. Let me try to describe what I saw that night, try picturing it- He didnt let me turn on the light because he knew the shock value would be much better with the moonlight lol.. There was splotches of RAID smeared on the walls and dripping down.. there were small puddles of RAID on the floor.. it looked as though someone had been killed in there. The countertop was completely littered in really ****** BIG ants that were just sitting there not moving. I immediately realize I'm not wearing shoes and assume the 'eek!' position frantically scanning the floor making sure they werent making a move for me now. From the hallway, sounding very entertained by the sound of his voice, he said 'they're dead, it's from the poison i've been leaving out'. Looking around a little closer I realize some of them are a whitish-clear, not black. He said thats from ones that came from the bathroom that he doused with bleach/left bleach puddles for them figuring they would die but they didnt, they just turned clear and kept moving! I inch towards the drawer with his spoons and as I open it, the bumping against the counter startles awake the ALMOST dead ants, NOT dead like I was told.. and instantly the counter becomes alive for half a second as every one of the ants take 3 limping lurches forward then lay still again. This of course makes me jump and run out of the kitchen as I wasnt expecting that at all and then I too was constantly looking around the room lol.. He eventually made a sticky side up duct-tape border around his bed to make it a bit of a safe-zone and finally got this wicked exterminator with a thick italian accent to come take care of it who told a great story of his near-death experience in a dark attic on the job the day before from something that growled in the dark unlike anything he's heard before so he threw these oversized mouse-trap things he had in the direction of the sound and high-tailed it outa there lol
and yea thats my horror story of the giant ants sorry its so long
This some how works
take a cup of water and a q tip, clean of the area normal, wipe up any ants with the qtip and stick them in the water, do this for two days...
they stay gone till you do some thing to call them back.
Interesting fact. I'll keep that in mind if I ever get an ant infestation. I think ants are some of the most interesting creatures in the world. They are so amazing.
no they are anticute, destuctive little pieces of burden.
the conspet of a thousand females crawling on my counter is not right
the appeance of ants in a house is sick and wrong.
that sounds very interessting but, what i cant figure out is why only 2, why not 3 or 5, and how so all the other ants know that 2 of them are out looking for the one dead one. it doesnt make any sense on how they corradinate them like that. i hope you understand what im trying to say | amicalindia wrote: |
What I know is an ant leaves some sort of secretion behind as it walks. It serves as trace to find way back and also as trace for other ants to follow. May be that is how they follow.
Now as to why they do that-
May be just the genetic program in their brains.
like terrorist increasing their attacks on US as US keeps on killing them.
just a joke. |
Ever tried spraying alcohol based perfume behind an ant and when another ant comes ... He gets drunk and spins around...
