APPALACHIAN ANTS--

We started out that day looking for ants most folks have never seen and hiking on a bicycle trail that does not yet exist.

The ants are the Appalachian variety (above) with the rusty colored head and thorax with a black bottom or gaster.  The critters in the photo were about 1/2 inch long and appear to be discussing the best use for the piece of dried leaf being hauled into their nest cavity.

A few years ago bicycling friends and I rode part of the abandoned railroad corridor which one day will be a bike trail from Brinkhaven to Killbuck via Glenmont in southwestern Holmes County.  I discovered huge ant mounds that day and our recent outing was to rediscover those mounds for this story.

The normal range of these ants is along the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia to Georgia and inland to the western side of the Appalachian Mountains.  So, these critters have expanded their advertised range a  bit west of there.

These are mound building ants; big mounds--often several feet tall and six feet or so across at their bases.  These mounds can be undermined with a tunnel system another several feet below ground and six feet or so outside the perimeter of the nest.  They may contain several hundred thousand ants.

The colonies living in the mounds can have numerous, egg-laying queens.  Their mounds serve as solar-powered incubators for their eggs.

If young trees begin to grow around the nest creating shade, the ants will bite the tree bark and inject formic acid, killing the offending trees and protecting the solar exposure.

We hiked about two miles out that day and noticed maybe a dozen of these mounds just along the edge of the abandoned right-of-way.  These ants really prefer fields that are not mowed but are occasionally grazed.  The grazing animals keep the weed growth low enough so the weeds do not interfere with sunlight heating the nests.

Who knows how many nests might be found if the conditions met the ant's ideal specifications! 

And, consider this from our story's research:  Though only a tiny fraction of the size of humans, the total weight of all the ants in the world is estimated to equal that of all humans.

Mark Meinzer takes a close, photographic peek at a mound.  Notice the good, sunlight exposure on this mound and several tunnels visible to the mound's interior.