Aquaponics - Ants

I have some new and exciting visitors to my system.

Ants.

There sure are a lot of ants when there are ants.

For the last few weeks, there has been something sticky forming on the leaves of the strawberry plants. I'm not sure if its got anything to do with the mould, but it does seem to be on those varieties of strawberry that were also trying their hand at mould farming.

Interestingly the leaves were so sticky that they were forcing aphids to stay longer than they had originally intended when landing on the sticky leaves.

I was going to write a post about how good my strawberry plants were at pretending to be sticky traps, but it turns out, ants ate the dead aphids (you can still see some aphids on the leaf to the left), and now seem to be eating the sticky.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Currently, it's just a thing.





I'll be getting a little upset if they run out of leaf sticky and discover that strawberries are chock full of sticky, but until then, like everyone who isn't a caterpillar, a snail or a slug, they will remain welcome.

My only accommodation has been to move the create I sit on over a little to give them room to cut across what used to be my space. They seem very obsessed with maintaining their ant highway along that path, so I moved my create few inches to the left.



Not just Aquaponics - Ants, but also 120 things in 20 years.