CityState: Current l Edited by Jamie Coelho
James Waters studies ants at
Providence College. Students are
doing a statewide survey; turns out
ants like pecan sandies.
In Search of Ants
A statewide survey of ants searches for new species. By Todd McLeish
Ants aren’t high on anyone’s list of charismatic creatures, but if you want to find some unusual specimens, James Waters can
show you how. He and his students at Providence College are conducting a statewide survey of ants, and part of myrmecological
lore, the scientific study of ants, is that pecan sandies — the tasty shortbread cookies — are the best bait for attracting them.
“When ants carry the crumbs back to their nests, it’s easier to
track the crumbs (light on a dark background) than to track the
ants themselves (dark on a dark background),” Waters says. It
turns out, ants love peanut butter and Spam, too.
Not much else is known about the ants that call Rhode Island
home, however, so Waters is searching manmade and natural
habitats for as many species as he can find. “Knowing the species
we live with is the cornerstone of all biology,” he says. “Having
simple baseline information about what species of ants are where
lets us ask lots of interesting questions.”
So far, the team has identified thirty-seven kinds of ants in Providence
alone, mostly on the Providence College campus and at
Roger Williams Park, where the state’s first African big-headed
ants were discovered by Lou Perrotti in the zoo’s new rainforest
exhibit. Statewide, sixty-nine species of ants have been recorded,
but Waters thinks the total number is likely closer to 100. Among
them is the very rare fat curltail ant, first found last year by elementary
school student Trey Hutchinson in his West Greenwich
backyard.
That’s the kind of unusual discovery that Waters and his students
are making on a regular basis. They found New England’s first population
of Asian needle ants, an aggressive invasive species, next to
a dormitory at Providence College. And at Lincoln Woods, they
identified tiny vampire ants, which puncture the exoskeleton of
their larvae to drink their blood.
“Ants are the most ecologically dominant animal on Earth. They
outweigh humans on the planet,” he says. “And with societies
ranging in size from dozens to millions of individuals, they have
evolved complex rules for behavior, cooperation and social immunity
that we could learn a lot from.”
PHOTOGRAPHY: JUSTIN JAMES MUIR/PROVIDENCE COLLEGE.
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MAY/JUNE 2020 19