ant girl august
Frontline updates from my battle against pests; playlists and bug facts
Greetings, bog bitches! I write to you from the other side of the most horrific, traumatic, soul-crushing experience a human can endure: moving house.
After spending almost a decade in a condo, in which I had only a small, temperamental patio where plants went to die and squirrels came to shit, I now have a backyard! Ten square feet of my very own grass, ready to be planted, pruned, and shaped into a suburban paradise. Not to brag, but I’ve even curated some local wildlife already: I am now the proud custodian of the family of rats living beneath my deck.
My dog has really taken to her new rat-mother responsibilities. She checks on them eight times a day, wakes up during the night thinking of them, and is so consumed with their welfare that she won’t even pee in the backyard. I assume this is because she’s trying to make the area more hospitable, and not because she is a coonhound with obsessive compulsive sniffing disorder.
It’s been a very pest-filled few weeks in my life. The other day, my aforementioned dog attacked a wasp nest and we had to pull stingers out of her nose and shoulders, and then drug her with bennys (Benadryl). The same thing happened to my sister.
It was maybe for the best, because the enforced day of sleep forced her to relax and stop thinking about the rats (my dog, not my sister)—and it gave me time to pull out my super creative rat solution: peppermint oil.
Essential oils? For pests? #allnatural #girlboss #rawmilkforlife
Peppermint oil has saved my life before, when I had an ant infestation in my car. Some of you will know that my ant phobia stems from the time I was on the interstate, turned on my air conditioning, and a Biblical flood of ants emerged. My proudest moment is not killing myself and all of I-95 South.
Ant traps couldn’t keep up with demand, and I couldn’t exactly spray chemicals in my enclosed car, and finally I realized I needed to cut it off at the source: the outside. So I absolutely drenched my wheels, hood, and window cracks in peppermint oil. I sprayed the inside of my doors and kept a spray bottle in my cup holder, so I could spritz any rogues while driving. Slowly but surely, it beat back the ants.
For ants, it’s less about the peppermint and more about the oil. Because oil doesn’t evaporate as quickly, it is able to essentially clog up the ant’s spiracles (pores) which they use for respiration, thereby suffocating them. And it makes my car smell like Christmas.
Peppermint oil is also decent for rodent repellant, according to Google. The strong scent bothers the rodents, and blocks their ability to sniff out food. Allegedly. Because it’s not a poison, there’s no worry of it impacting other creatures or traveling up the food chain—it simply encourages the rats to move along and take up residence in my neighbor’s yard instead.
We’ll see if it works. Thus far, it’s been great at annoying my dog’s nose, at least, which means she isn’t spending her entire day screaming at the back door, begging to go outside. I feel bad for depriving her of her rat time, but I think it will be better for her psychologically in the long run.
Killing my house guests
I have also discovered that a group of spotted lantern flies seem to have caught a ride into my house. I assume they either got boxed up with the outdoor stuff, or hung around on the boxes during the move, but regardless of how they got in, several of them are living in my guest room.
I’ve been finding them one at a time and having a crisis because my entire house is carpeted, and I rent it, so I can’t squash these bugs on someone else’s rug. I also can’t release them outside, because they’re horrifically invasive. I considered trying to taxidermy them, because they’re so beautiful, but I don’t think my partner wants me to start up a bug mortuary when we’ve been in our new house for less than a week. So, I’ve been keeping them in an airtight container until they die, then flushing them.
Suffocation was plan B, by the way. Plan A was flushing them directly, which is how I learned that spotted lantern flies can swim, and will crawl their way out of the toilet pipes if left to their own devices. As a child, I was terrified of that episode of X-Files where a monster pops out of the toilet, and now all my fears are coming true.
🦟Drowning my enemies in the bucket of doom🦟
The final boss of my new pest-filled existence is my lifelong enemy: the mosquito. My new yard is swarmed with them. I have welts on every single part of my body and oozing sores on my butt and around my bra strap. I wake up with blood under my fingernails from scratching my legs in my sleep.
I’m one of those people who is genetically predisposed to mosquito bites. Since I was a wee bairn, I have been chewed up and spit out by every mosquito I’ve ever met, while my family sits by and tells me to stop bitching because the bugs aren’t bad. But baby, I was born this way. Science hasn’t figured out what exactly makes me so appealing (it’s either my carbon dioxide levels, natural body odor, carboxylic acids levels, or blood type) but something has made me an all you can eat buffet for my new backyard neighbors.1
It’s not surprising that the munchies are so bad right now. Virginia had an extremely wet start to the summer, and my yard backs up onto a scrubby “wood” where people dump their old bicycles and yard waste. Add that to miles of badly-built townhouses fucking with the natural watershed, and we have a veritable paradise of standing water and leaf litter prime for mosquito invasion.
Unfortunately, my best friend peppermint oil will not do in this situation. My neighbors have a bug zapper, but I’m morally opposed to them because they kill basically everything except mosquitos, and our entire ecosystem is going to shit and the world is going to die because we’ve eradicated pollinating moths. I also am not drenching my yard in chemicals, because as established, my dog can’t keep her nose to herself.
Which means I finally got to fulfill a lifelong wish: to make a bucket of doom.2
The bucket of doom is a cheap form of mosquito population control. You grab a bucket, fill it with water, grass clippings, detritus, etc., and add in a dunk block that contains BTI, a bacteria which kills mosquito larvae. These are available in most department stores for under $10. The water and grass attract female mosquitos to lay their eggs, and the bacteria then kills the larvae, cutting off your population before it begins. It is, as my sister once put it, Planned Parenthood for mosquitos.
It’s cheap and easy, but it works slowly—mosquito life cycles last a few weeks, so it will take 2-3 weeks to start seeing the impact of your dunk. You’ll also have to replace the dunk block monthly, so set a reminder. And finally, you’ll want to put chicken wire or something over the top to prevent accidental drownings from other backyard critters like chipmunks or squirrels.
I know everyone is extremely excited to see how my mosquito abortion clinic works out, so I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
Content warning: ants 🐜🐜🐜
Since I’m talking about bugs, I asked my friends what else they wanted to know. I wish I had not done this, because now, unfortunately, I have to talk about ants.
As established, I fucking hate ants. They are the insect equivalent of sand—they get everywhere, too much can give you a rash, and four months down the line you think you’re free of them, but then you shake out an old purse and whoop! There’s an ant, wriggling around on your gum wrapper.
But unfortunately, ants are also one of the most impressive insects out there. My friend Lisa asked me to list the three coolest things that bugs do, and ants are, begrudgingly, cool. So I present:
✨Three things I wish I didn’t know about ants (because it makes me respect them)✨
Ants perform amputations
We have known for a while that ants work as a collective in all things—including caring for their sick. When a comrade is injured, ants will excrete an antimicrobial substance onto their fellow soldier to fight off infection or bacteria. But in 2024, German scientists discovered that Florida carpenter ants3 (which don’t produce the medical goo) will actually perform highly precise amputations to fellow ants in order to prevent bacteria and infection from reaching the blood stream.
In the species that practice internal medicine, colonies have designated “nurse ants” who will go out to the frontlines and carry their wounded back to the colony for medical care. These ants have their surgery down to such a science that they know when and where to amputate, understanding that if an injury is too high up, the procedure will be useless.
This means that ants are diagnosing and providing targeted therapy to their nestmates, and are, as of now, the only species other than humans to do so. And they don’t even have to go into debt for med school.
Ants practice advanced agricultural techniques
Long before humans created the cotton gin, ants were practicing advanced agricultural techniques. Different species have different specialties, but almost all ants practice some degree of farming—and some have been doing it for upwards of 50 million years.4
Ants will cultivate and grow certain types of fungus in order to feed their colonies. Most ant species collect organic waste, compost it, and turn it into fertilizer for their farms. Leafcutter ants don’t eat the material they’re cutting out of your plants, but rather use it to grow fungus for food. Your standard garden ants will actually practice insect husbandry and establish aphid farms, where they breed and protect aphids. They aren’t eating the aphids, but rather eating aphid secretions. Compare it to a shepherd protecting a flock, or ants having their own little honey bee farms. That’s why your vegetable garden looks like shit, by the way.
Ants can have almost-human life cycles
While most insects will live for a season, or even a manner of weeks, in some ant species, reproductive queens can live for up to 30 years. This goes against almost all comparable science, which tells us that organisms with high reproductive rates tend to have shorter lifespans. If you’re laying thousands of eggs a year, your life span is typically shorter.
Not so for certain ant queens, who can extend their longevity by suppressing insulin levels.5 Sort of jealous, because that means they can just eat a ton of shit without worrying about the havoc it will wreck on their inner systems. True queens, honestly.
Got a bug question? I will try to answer it
I received so many bug questions that I cannot contain them in one Substack. So stay tuned, because in our next issue, we’ll be answering all your pressing insect inquiries! We’ll be talking about:
Cicadas
Earthworms
Closet vs. pantry moths
Getting rid of fruit flies
Dealing with wasps
Identifying the alien caterpillar trying to break into your house
Have a bug question of your own? Drop it in the comments and I’ll include it!
✅ Jobs for the week
Read my friend Audrey’s Substack. She launched a new magazine last week called The Shit Post, and it’s earnest, absurd, and so lovely. It also inspired me to create my insect advice column.
Go dump out any standing water on your patio. School is back in session, but the mosquitos still be having sex. Do yourself a favor and dump out that standing water.
Clean your baseboards. They really are the dirtiest part of your house, which I discovered while moving. There’s no bug facts associated with this, I just am living in a state of being grossed out by myself, and I want to spare you that shame as well.
Jam out to my bug playlist. This is maybe the most literal playlist I’ve ever made, and I want everyone to be proud of me that I didn’t put Butterfly by Crazy Town on it.
Laura Tran, PhD and Tanvir Khan, PhD, What Are Mosquitoes Attracted To? The Scientist Digest 1; January 2024. https://www.the-scientist.com/why-do-mosquitoes-bite-some-people-more-than-others-71475
Learn about the Mosquito Bucket Challenge over on Homegrown National Park and learn in detail how to make your own!
Humberto Basilio, Ants may be the only animal that performs surgical amputations. Science. July 2024. https://www.science.org/content/article/ants-may-be-only-animal-performs-surgical-amputations
Smithsonian Institute for Biodiversity Genomics. Mutual Attraction: The Evolution of Agriculture in Ants. https://biogenomics.si.edu/research/research-action/mutual-attraction-evolution-agriculture-ants
Hua Yan et al., Insulin signaling in the long-lived reproductive caste of ants. Science 377, 1092-1099 (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abm8767
“Biblical ant flood” made my jaw drop