When Katie Guhl traveled at the end of May to a wedding in New Orleans, she returned home to find swarms of ants in her kitchen. She was livid. Katie said that she didn’t leave any bread crumbs on the floor and she had never seen an ant in her apartment before. She lives on the 6th floor.
On the r/Brooklyn forum on Reddit, “Antiunitary” posted, “I woke up this morning to ants crawling around my living room. I live on the 3rd floor and have never had problems with any insects.” Spontaneously, “they just showed up one day,” said Melissa Russell Paige, who has lived in the same second-floor Brooklyn apartment for eight years and had never before seen an ant in her home—not even once. Her upstairs neighbor had ants, too. In a text message, Russell Paige shared three photos of liquid ant baits. Each was clogged with ant corpses.
City dwellers may assume that having ants is something that happens to other people, residents in the quiet woods of Westchester or the sleepy suburban shrubs of New Jersey. According to the New York Times, ants “mingling with the urbane in an urban environment,” and so far from the ground, can be confusing. But it’s exciting to Samantha Kennett, a graduate student at Kennesaw State University in South Georgia. Kennett works in Dr. Clint Penick’s social insects lab. She studies urban-ant ecology.
Lasius emarginatus is not interested in your cookie crumbs, either, Ms. Kennett explained. “This is one of the things that I’m trying to figure out. When ants are living in really urban habitats, they tend to eat a lot of human foods and they’re able to shift their diets towards more human foods. But this ant, even though it’s living in the most urban habitat, does not appear to be consuming human foods.”
Over the last decade, the teeny Lasius emarginatus, which has a reddish-brown thorax and a dark-brown head and abdomen, has been absolutely thriving in New York, and has been nicknamed ManhattAnt. The ant species’ range, apparently, includes the upper floors of apartment buildings. “Like many ambitious New Yorkers, the ManhattAnt is upwardly mobile, it forages in trees,” Ms. Kennett said. “It climbs a lot. They found it in second-story buildings in Europe.” Now, as the ant expands its habitat, it appears to be scaling skyscrapers in New York City.
Upon examining photographs, Ms. Kennett was able to confirm that Ms. Russell Paige’s ants were indeed Lasius emarginatus. Ms. Guhl did not have photos, and could not be sure of the species that had visited her apartment. “I wasn’t exactly looking super carefully at them,” said Ms. Guhl.
On the r/Brooklyn forum on Reddit, “Antiunitary” posted, “I woke up this morning to ants crawling around my living room. I live on the 3rd floor and have never had problems with any insects.” Spontaneously, “they just showed up one day,” said Melissa Russell Paige, who has lived in the same second-floor Brooklyn apartment for eight years and had never before seen an ant in her home—not even once. Her upstairs neighbor had ants, too. In a text message, Russell Paige shared three photos of liquid ant baits. Each was clogged with ant corpses.
City dwellers may assume that having ants is something that happens to other people, residents in the quiet woods of Westchester or the sleepy suburban shrubs of New Jersey. According to the New York Times, ants “mingling with the urbane in an urban environment,” and so far from the ground, can be confusing. But it’s exciting to Samantha Kennett, a graduate student at Kennesaw State University in South Georgia. Kennett works in Dr. Clint Penick’s social insects lab. She studies urban-ant ecology.
Lasius emarginatus is not interested in your cookie crumbs, either, Ms. Kennett explained. “This is one of the things that I’m trying to figure out. When ants are living in really urban habitats, they tend to eat a lot of human foods and they’re able to shift their diets towards more human foods. But this ant, even though it’s living in the most urban habitat, does not appear to be consuming human foods.”
Over the last decade, the teeny Lasius emarginatus, which has a reddish-brown thorax and a dark-brown head and abdomen, has been absolutely thriving in New York, and has been nicknamed ManhattAnt. The ant species’ range, apparently, includes the upper floors of apartment buildings. “Like many ambitious New Yorkers, the ManhattAnt is upwardly mobile, it forages in trees,” Ms. Kennett said. “It climbs a lot. They found it in second-story buildings in Europe.” Now, as the ant expands its habitat, it appears to be scaling skyscrapers in New York City.
Upon examining photographs, Ms. Kennett was able to confirm that Ms. Russell Paige’s ants were indeed Lasius emarginatus. Ms. Guhl did not have photos, and could not be sure of the species that had visited her apartment. “I wasn’t exactly looking super carefully at them,” said Ms. Guhl.
