Richard Feynman’s Nontoxic Ant Ferry

RICHARD FEYNMAN, CALTECH’S Nobel Prize winning physicist (1965; quantum electrodynamics), was a Princeton University graduate student during the early years of World War II when foraging ants crawled in his bay window and spurred development of an ant control device that did not kill the creatures. It was not quite as momentous as the proverbial apple conking Isaac Newton on the head in 1666 and waking him up to gravity. But according to Mathpages.com, Feynman’s “analysis of the behavior of ants involves some of the same ideas that were central to his work in theoretical physics.”

On a more mundane note, Feynman recounts the experience in his 1985 book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: “In Princeton the ants found my larder, where I had jelly and bread and stuff, which was quite a distance from the window. A long line of ants marched along the floor across the living room. It was during the time I was doing these experiments on ants, so I thought to myself, ‘What can I do to stop them from coming to my larder without killing any ants? No poison; you gotta be humane to the ants!’”

Interesting sentiments coming from a man who worked on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico to help develop atomic energy into the bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II. But, of course, the goal of the Manhattan Project was to build the bomb ahead of Hitler’s scientists working in Europe. Peace and freedom were envisioned at the end of the atomic trail.

“One question that I wondered about was why the ant trails look so straight and nice,” wrote Feynman in his oft-reprinted 1985 book. “The ants look as if they know what they’re doing, as if they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to demonstrate their sense of geometry didn’t work. Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on Alameda Street, some ants came out around the bathtub. I thought, ‘This is a great opportunity.’ I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub, and sat there the whole afternoon until an ant finally found the sugar. It’s only a question of patience.”

Today we know that ants are putting down a pheromone trail, and that over time the trails most frequented (i.e with food at the end) get a stronger dose of pheromone while the pheromone disappears from the least-wandered trails. Feynman’s observations are called Ant Logic or Ant Colony Optimization by those who, in or out of the bathtub, today study the trail-following process, oftentimes using virtual ants in computer simulations for Internet routing, robotics, and business and travel solutions.

Apparently, via pheromone trails between their nest and food resources, in their everyday life ants have mastered a workable solution to what is called The Traveling Salesman Problem, which the web site of the same name (abbrev. TSP) calls “one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics.”

Planning the best route between a hundred cities for a traveling rock band or the quickest path for sending data packets among thousands of Internet nodes on the Worldwide Web can apparently overheat and exhaust modern computers. In a chapter titled “Ant Logic” in The Perfect Swarm, book author Len Fisher says: “To calculate the optimal route that Ulysses might have taken between the 16 cities mentioned in The Odyssey, for example, requires the evaluation of 653,837,184,000 possible routes.” That works out to “ten thousand billion calculations” for a relatively simple travel problem.

Fortunately, Nobel Prize-caliber calculations were not needed to disrupt ant trails and humanely protect Feynman’s Princeton larder or Pasadena home. ANT FERRY was the name Feynman gave to his least-toxic ant removal device: “I made a lot of little strips of paper and put a fold in them, so I could pick up ants and ferry them from one place to another,” wrote Feynman in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

“What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about 6 or 8 inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn’t know about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning with food walked onto my little ferry, I’d carry him over and put him on the sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder. I didn’t wash the floor. I didn’t do anything but ferry ants.”

No Nobel Prize is needed to obliterate ant trails and naturally protect larders without toxins or even killing any ants. However, the patience, the extra hour, may be outside the modern mindset. Nonetheless, thank you Mr. Feynman for what your colleagues call a PROOF of CONCEPT.

Headless Zombie Fire Ants, Brain-Eating Flies!

FIRE ANTS ATTACKED by BRAIN-EATING FLY MAGGOTS, transformed into HEADLESS ZOMBIES. So says the ever-helpful Kavita Sharma, an Auburn University entomologist in fire ant-plagued Alabama, a likely port of disembarkation for the painfully-biting red imported fire ant invasion of the United States that began in earnest during World War II.

If you missed it on the evening news or failed to scan the supermarket tabloid headlines, the Internet tabloid journalists have had fun dramatizing it on You Tube. Not that the brain-eating flies have yet provided much relief from the ever-expanding, biting fire ant invasion raging from Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico to Florida and the Carolinas. Indeed, the ants may be bent on global colonization, having expanded from their South America homeland in Argentina to North America, Australia and other continents.

Several decades of pesticide spraying, and more recently poison baits, have done little to slow the spread of the biting ants, which have effectively colonized the southern U.S. and seem to be adapting to slightly cooler northern climes. Not that it is all bad, if you can avoid being bitten. The ravenous ants provide vital biological pest control on some farms; for example ridding cotton farms of bollworms, weevils and other pests that would otherwise be sprayed with pesticides. No doubt, the ants would also make mincemeat and hash out of any bedbugs in an infested mattress placed in their path.

But the pain of the bites and the problematic fire ant mounds erupting in lawns and pastures necessitate control measures. As is typical of pest control programs, years of failed but costly chemical eradication eventually breed pesticide-resistant insects. Score one point for the fire ants and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Score good revenues for valiant pest control efforts. But longer term, insect genetics adapt to almost anything thrown at them.

In the 1954 sci-fi flick, Them, even Fess Parker (Davy Crockett fame), Leonard Nimoy (an uncredited, pre-Star Trek role) and James Whitmore’s bullets failed to stem a mutant ant invasion linked to atomic tests. But James Arness (of later Gunsmoke fame) finally routed the giant mutant ants colonizing downtown Los Angeles with an orgy of messy napalm-like flame throwers. Poison baits minimizing environmental contamination and brain-eating flies providing biological ant control look elegant in comparison. Indeed, pest control has come a long way in the half century since Rachel Carson railed against pesticides.

In her poster display at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting in downtown Indianapolis, Kavita Sharma provided scientific details on how the brain-eating phorid flies locate fresh worker fire ant brains and turn the ants into zombies. Pheromone-like chemicals may be involved. One of the phorid fly species introduced into the U.S. from Argentina for fire ant biocontrol is literally super-efficient and would make time management experts proud. When not in the maggot stage eating ant brains, adult flies combine mating with searching out worker fire ants with nourishing brains to attack. No doubt more to come on You Tube’s Zombie Ant Channel.