That old Frank Sinatra song High Hopes, in which a plucky lone ant moves a rubber tree plant, no longer seems quite so jolly. In Europe’s latest insect insurgency, ants in Germany have caused power cuts and extensively damaged public infrastructure.
Insects terrorising humans was a common theme of 1950s sci-fi movies but the modern reality here, while less scary, is literal devastation. There’s something both Hitchcockian and karmically dystopian about insects destroying human habitats rather than the other way round.
Germany’s ant immigrants are 4mm Tapinoma magnum, until recently found closer to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Germany has found them remarkably cold-tolerant settlers. Their mass-infiltration of building cavities and electrical circuitry boxes caused power cuts and wrecked a playground in the city of Kehl recently, and underground-dwelling colonies have lifted pavements near rail platforms in Karlsruhe.
They form super-colonies of around 20 million, happily merging with neighbouring underground settlements to cover many kilometres, hence their ability to undermine structures overhead.
As well as being heat tolerant, they survive heavy frosts. They repay squashing by exuding the smell of rancid butter. In any case, it’s not practical to squish 20 million ants, and scientists have yet to come up with a practical eradication method that would kill the colonies without endangering other creatures.
German municipal authorities have used boiling water with some success. But entomologists warn that householders need specialist help to eradicate them. They may look almost exactly like the common ant, but they’re tougher and exponentially more numerous. And they bite.
Serbia, France, Belgium, the UK and Azerbaijan have also unwittingly hosted new Tapinoma diasporas, thought to have arrived on Mediterranean garden plant imports. In Switzerland, they infested a potato plantation the size of five football pitches.
The ants join bedbugs and moths as vaultingly destructive domestic pests within the continent. The bedbug panic that emanated from Paris two years ago continues apace, with regular reports of European and British hotel customers claiming compensation for bite-disturbed sleep. They’re hard to spot, so some travellers take elaborate precautions with luggage, such as keeping all bags in the hotel bath, to avoid the risk of taking home any invertebrate souvenirs.
It’s also increasingly common for clothes moths to eat people literally out of house and home. In a famous example, the daughter of a Georgian oligarch received a court-ordered refund earlier this year for most of the £32.5 million (NZ$73.6m) she paid for a mansion in London’s Notting Hill, because the vendor neglected to disclose its stubborn infestation of fabric-devouring Tineola bisselliella.
The moths’ larvae feed voraciously on natural fibres, and the lawsuit drew copious reports from other householders forced to move out and fumigate following wholesale loss of clothing and furnishings. Like the Tapinoma ants, they’re fiendishly difficult to evict. The Notting Hill house quickly became unfeasible to occupy, with all non-synthetic clothing and furnishing constantly holed and shredded.
People swear by various folk remedies, from lavender to cedar balls, but most of the truly effective treatments – burning, arsenic and mothballs – are also harmful to humans and pets. It’s possible to freeze the larvae to death but not the eggs. Anyway, how many household freezers could accommodate a sofa? The best hope seems to reside in tiny parasitic wasps, Trichogrammatidae, which can be bought online. They eat the eggs, departing the household once their tucker runs out. The perfect guests.
Time and research will tell whether these heightened infestations are climate-related or something even more sinister, à la those old noir films.
But with reports that some Germans are so hypervigilant about keeping super ants at bay they dare not even go on holiday, can it be long before a smuggling trade develops for anteaters, armadillos and pangolins?