Ants are packing up their families, including their queen, and hopping in a car for a ride to a new area where they can set up a home, according to a recent study.
Ants have been observed hitchhiking, according to Scotty Yang, an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Entomology within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Yang recently published a paper in Ecological Entomology describing the automotive phenomenon.
It has been well documented that insects can hitch a ride on vehicles, but typically the research focuses on agricultural machinery or the trucking industry.
Yang’s work is the first to look at ants hitching on everyday vehicles.
“We saw social media posts where people were devastated about finding their cars covered in ants,” Yang said. “Although we felt sorry for them, we wanted to examine whether these events had anything in common.”
Yang learned that hitchhiking ants need three main things to succeed:
- The ants must be able to climb the surface of the vehicle
- The ants must be exhibiting foraging/colonizing behaviors
- The ants must be able to withstand the temperature of the part of the vehicle they settle in
The spread of invasive ants was previously thought to occur primarily through the transport of agricultural, arboreal and horticultural materials such as logs, plants and dirt.
Most personal vehicles offer no real food or shelter, but when ants live in overcrowded colonies, they look for a new, bigger home.
Of the 100 worst invasive species in the world, five are species of ants and two of these are already established in Virginia: the red imported fire ant and the Argentine ant.
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Crystal Graham
