For these Ants, the Picnic is Your House

kw: book reviews, monographs, natural history

Have you ever seen an ant the size of a hornet? Chances are, if you did, you thought it was a hornet! Except it was black, and didn't fly very fast. The Eastern and Western "black carpenter ant" species have queens an inch long, and workers a half inch or larger in length. In northern areas too cold for most termites, they take over the job of reducing our houses to piles of sawdust. At least in North America, when you see a black ant that big, you are seeing one of these carpenter ants. However, if you see only one, it is probably a lone forager looking for water. When they are hunting, they stay more hidden. They don't eat wood, but insects that infest the trees they live in. They just prefer "digging" in wood to digging in dirt like more familiar ants.

Laurel D. Hansen and John H. Klotz have produced a book that is quite to the scientific side of the technical/popular spectrum: Carpenter Ants of the United States and Canada. The book is brief but comprehensive. The morphology chapter has numerous drawings and photos that show the internals...and you thought it was tricky to dissect a frog in BIO 101! There is enough new terminology here to keep you busy for a day or two adding new vocabulary.

Here I learned that the two big, black species are but two of 24 species of North American carpenter ants, though one is found only in Hawaii and one only in Florida. Eight of the 24 are found in the mid-Atlantic area where I live. Oh, joy! What I hadn't known was that the common species have three sizes of workers: the half-inch monsters, some a bit over a quarter inch, and some rather less than a quarter inch. It is the smaller ones you are likely to see tending aphids on your rose bush—their sugar farm—, while the bigger ones tackle moths and flies for protein. I thought they were different species.

A strenuous read, but rewarding.