Tea with Your Ant


After taking my morning cup of Assam tea over to the computer to drink while I checked out the news items online, I picked up a BBC news item from the 12th of January on the careless use of pesticides around some of the Assam tea gardens just outside the beautiful Kaziranga National Park. Assam nestles between Bhutan and Burma in northeast India and produces a large amount of tea, which I for one find essential to my daily wellbeing. Kaziranga is home to an abundance of wildlife. However, two pregnant elephants had left the park to sample the greener grass over the hill and had then died from pesticide poisoning. It takes a lot of pesticide to kill an elephant and even more to kill two. Many cows had already succumbed, as had the vultures that started to tidy up.

Why was such death and destruction sown around the tea gardens? Apparently to kill the ants. The local red weaver ants (Oecophylla), also known as fire ants, of using their larva as glue-guns to stick the edges of leaves together – they don’t bother with neat stitching. They’re upwardly mobile, living in the trees and not in nondescript holes in the ground. This tends to keep the trees free of other pests and they are used as front-line bio-control troopers in mango and citrus orchards with considerable success.

 It is clear that glued up tender leaves would not be desirable for my morning tea, but neither would pesticide loads that would kill an elephant! Some of the tea gardens have gone organic and others may well do so or at least support a pesticide ban. But maybe there could be a lesson from the Asian super-ant (Lasius neglectus). It is a black ant, not a red one, and is less aggressive but has an interesting proclivity as outlined in an old BBC report from last August. Then they reported from Hidcote Manor, a National Trust house in the UK, that this variety of Asian ants had a passion for electricity that exceeded their desire for food and drink. They caused some little havoc by forming huge clusters in fuse and junction boxes causing an unreliable electrical supply as they got a big charge out of there rave. Maybe solar panels connected to electrified collection boxes could tempt the fire ants away from the first flush tea bush tips. Who knows but maybe the collected ants could be re-settled in fruit orchards if the voltages were set at the correct level.

Footnote: 
                 I would love to hear the etymology of the entomological name Lasius neglectus. It can't be as comical as I think!

More of the Same



Another damp day. The sky is like a steel-grey cloud-umbrella with lighter, more hopeful colors showing on every horizon. The ponds are generally quiet and still, save for a group of three geese, necks arched and honking like the last trump in an attempt to discourage the landing of a fourth goose on their island. The inflow to the pond is still fast and the level is rising so maybe the geese are planning ahead. The rapid influx of river water has resulted in this end of the ponds being brown and cloudy. Maybe this is why my heron is sitting, hunched and looking thoroughly teed-off and hungry.

Further up, the ponds are clear as the particulates have sedimented out. Here a flotilla of Buffleheads are diving in unison and popping up still in formation. Very nice and tidy, as are their outfits. They will easily succeed in the audition for ‘Pond Cheerleaders’. No one else comes near to this display of synchronized swimming, if their beaks were flexible, they would be wearing fixed smiles. The other groups of ducks that stick together are more difficult to identify. The males and females have coloring like Ruddies but the males have Merganser-like crests. They migrated here at same time as the Buffleheads but to me they remain mysterious and in disguise.

Our adventurous slugs are out again, but today they have eschewed their unidirectional travel. Their headings appears much more random, with many bending round to head home to follow those who have already made that wise decision as the allure of the excitement on the blacktop fades in comparison with cozy plenty of the grassy herbage of home.

Matter of Moment


A day of sun and showers lures me to check out the pond albeit a little later than usual this morning. It has a very peaceful look today, with only a few ducks leaving nice vee-wakes as they rush from the bank at my approach. There is a cluster of one-legged geese on an island relaxing in close unison. If one falls off its leg, the others will go down like dominos. However, there is no mischief-maker there to give one a push.

Even the heron seems to have had her breakfast as she sits on a downed tree on the bank preening her untidy and long gray feathers. As she spots me, the preening goes to hell in a hand basket and her neck gets very long. But as I continue my walk, it gets shorter with each step until she’s lost it completely as I draw level. I wink but she gives me the brush off as usual and gets back to trying to decide between fish and frogs for lunch.

Suddenly I notice that a dozen or two hardy, but foolhardy, small slugs have forsaken the grass and herb shelter of the verge, lured away by the promised delights of the blacktop just five feet away across the moist concrete. Just like the last time I saw them, they are all on parallel courses to the road but not taking the shortest route. If the sun wasn’t hiding behind the skirts of a large motherly cloud, they would have been lined up with the sun’s rays on their back providing them with the maximum warmth. With no sun having been visible for a little while, they seem to be taking this all on trust.

Leaving the bookstore on my return journey the light shower turns nasty and my pace becomes ‘with purpose’. The slugs have clearly thought better of their foolishness and my thoughts turn to the question of was a thunderstorm forecast. Not a nice thought to linger on as the ground is flat and open. Whilst bolts of lightning are bad enough prospects, the recent news from the Fermi-lab that thunderstorms spew out streams of anti-matter make dawdling even more unattractive than the water running of my coat onto the back of my trouser legs. Might some jogger find just a pair of smoking shoes on the sidewalk and wonder how could someone spontaneously combust in a rainstorm?

Wine and Starlings


There have been reports in the news of several flocks of birds mysteriously dying in different countries around the world. The UK papers today (the Guardian, Telegraph and Mail) all focus on the Romanian starling flock drop. The autopsies indicated that the cause of the drop was a drop too much. The birds had gorged themselves on the crushed grape–yeast feast discarded by a local vintner as being of no further interest to him. The starlings clearly disagreed with this conjecture and set out to prove their case, and in doing so, drunk themselves to death. There is no indication that the birds in the other incidents in Sweden and the US had been partying.

It is interesting to note that just across the Black Sea from Romania lies Armenia, and the BBC reported that the earliest archeological evidence of wine making was recently discovered in a cave there. This means that the danger to local birdlife of overindulgence has been around for about 6,000 years. Even more apposite to the problem is the fact that burial mounds surrounded the archeological winemaking kit. The sober archeologists suggested that indicates that the wine was purely for ceremonial purposes. One is left to wonder if perhaps it was the quality of the wine that left a lot to be desired. In any case the local starlings need to activate their Twitter accounts as their tweets have clearly been ineffective to date in spreading the word of the dangers of alcohol abuse and where they can join a 12-hop program.