When Katie Guhl left for a wedding in New Orleans and a Memorial Day gathering in New Jersey, she left her apartment on East 81st street immaculate. What she didn’t expect when she returned was the swarms of ants in her kitchen.
“There were no crumbs to be had,” she said. Ants have never been a problem before, considering she lived on the sixth floor, and hadn’t been expected to be one.
Unlike cockroaches, ants aren’t as common in high rises, preferring soli-filled parks and yards. But scientists who study ants have found that recently a species of ants from Europe has settled in the city and have been found in places several stories above ground.
A disturbed witness of the ant outbreak wrote on the r/Brooklyn forum on Reddit, “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.” Another added: “I worked in an apartment building, and the 25th floor had ants in midtown.”
Impulsively, “they just showed up one day,” said Melissa Russell Paige, who has been living in the Brooklyn apartment same second floor for the past eight years, and had “never saw an ant even once.” Melissa’s upstairs neighbor, a reporter who has lived in New York for decades, had them too. She shared three photos in a text message of liquid ant baits, each one clogged with ant relics.
Samantha Kennett, a graduate student at Kennesaw State University in South Georgia in Dr. Clint Penick’s social insects lab studies urban ant ecology, more specifically, she studies an ant called Lasius emarginatus.
The species is not actually native to the United States, it is a European immigrant that is said to have arrived by ship. Scientists first spotted them in New York in 2011. Now nicknamed the ManhattAnt, the teeny Lasius emarginatus has been absolutely thriving in New York. “It forages in trees,” Kennett said. “It climbs a lot. They found it in second story buildings in Europe.”
Kennett was able to confirm that indeed the ants crawling in the apartments were Lasius emarginatus upon examining photographs.
But Lasius emarginatus aren’t actually interested in your cookie crumbs, 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.”
Despite being a pioneer, the ManhattAnt isn’t invincible. Ms. Guhl and Mrs. Russell Paige and her neighbor used liquid ant baits and the intruders were murdered quite quickly.
In-N.Y.C.-Apartments-the-Ants-Go-Marching-Up-The-New-York-Times
Download
“There were no crumbs to be had,” she said. Ants have never been a problem before, considering she lived on the sixth floor, and hadn’t been expected to be one.
Unlike cockroaches, ants aren’t as common in high rises, preferring soli-filled parks and yards. But scientists who study ants have found that recently a species of ants from Europe has settled in the city and have been found in places several stories above ground.
A disturbed witness of the ant outbreak wrote on the r/Brooklyn forum on Reddit, “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.” Another added: “I worked in an apartment building, and the 25th floor had ants in midtown.”
Impulsively, “they just showed up one day,” said Melissa Russell Paige, who has been living in the Brooklyn apartment same second floor for the past eight years, and had “never saw an ant even once.” Melissa’s upstairs neighbor, a reporter who has lived in New York for decades, had them too. She shared three photos in a text message of liquid ant baits, each one clogged with ant relics.
Samantha Kennett, a graduate student at Kennesaw State University in South Georgia in Dr. Clint Penick’s social insects lab studies urban ant ecology, more specifically, she studies an ant called Lasius emarginatus.
The species is not actually native to the United States, it is a European immigrant that is said to have arrived by ship. Scientists first spotted them in New York in 2011. Now nicknamed the ManhattAnt, the teeny Lasius emarginatus has been absolutely thriving in New York. “It forages in trees,” Kennett said. “It climbs a lot. They found it in second story buildings in Europe.”
Kennett was able to confirm that indeed the ants crawling in the apartments were Lasius emarginatus upon examining photographs.
But Lasius emarginatus aren’t actually interested in your cookie crumbs, 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.”
Despite being a pioneer, the ManhattAnt isn’t invincible. Ms. Guhl and Mrs. Russell Paige and her neighbor used liquid ant baits and the intruders were murdered quite quickly.
In-N.Y.C.-Apartments-the-Ants-Go-Marching-Up-The-New-York-Times
Download
