Ant problem

[mattbell]

Suppose your house (say, the one I'm living in now) has an ant problem.  Suppose you toss some food out and the ants get to it.  The ants take your food back and turn it in to more ants.  How many more ants?

Energy conversion across trophic levels in the food chain is around 10%, an ant in this part of the world weighs around 0.2mg, and a typical apple weighs around 300g. 

So... if the ants eat the whole apple, they can use it to make 150,000 more ants.  Fucking ants.  

Comments

[danea.livejournal.com]

This is what the super secret Chinese Ant Chalk is for. ;)

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, I had a girlfriend who left a bunch of food out at her old house and then was away for a week. There was a river of ants several inches wide coming in through the kitchen. We got our hands on a cinnamon jar of mythic proportions (perhaps a gallon) and used it to put a perimeter around a livable area while we deployed a dozen ant traps surrounding the area. It was epic, and I'm still kicking myself for not having taken pictures.