Out for Blood

[kevin_standlee]

As part of my diabetes monitoring, I take a blood sugar reading twice a day using a finger-sticking device that pokes a tiny hole in my finger for the blood sample. The necessary clean-up for these readings has led to an odd discovery.

As a consequence of the finger-sticking, I generate tissues with tiny blood spots on them where I've blotted the blood after I've taken the reading. These I throw in the trash, naturally. This morning, I noticed that ants had invaded the bathroom trash can and were swarming over a blood-spotted tissue therin.

The thought of swarming ants out for my blood is a little creepy.

Comments

[kshandra]

In light of this news item, this concerns me greatly....

[ashi.livejournal.com]

I've heard of ants that go after another type of leftover blood as well. Could be the same species.

What do the ants want?

[(Anonymous)]

Are the ants there for the protein in the blood? Or is there so much sugar in the blood that they want that?

In ancient times, they noticed ants gathered to diabetic urine...

Sorry about the anonymous comment. I'm just a passer-by.

Re: What do the ants want?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. I only know that the ants were interested in my blood. If I wake up in the night with an ant crawling over me, I'll probably start worrying that they're coming to nibble away at me.

[robot-grrl.livejournal.com]

I guess the questions should be: Are the ants large or small? Are the ants black, brown or red?

Having moved from the Chicago area to the San Diego area there have been some changes in how to handle surgical tissues after they have been processed. After our tissue samples have been fixed in formalin (formaldehyde dissolved in water), dehydrated in alcohols, and further processed in xylene and hot paraffin with other additives, we still need to seal the paraffin blocks after we're done cutting our slides. Why? Because there are bugs that will get into storage and eat the tissue right out of the blocks.

This I guess is a problem where it's warm most of the year. Yeah, bleah.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Small black ants, and they're a problem here year-round. I feed them Terro traps when they show up, after which they go away for a while and then come back.

[robot-grrl.livejournal.com]

If they were small red ants I would say Terro syrup. But, small black are either sweet or protein ants. With blood I would say more likely they prefer protein. Syrup won't work well with protein eaters so you need something granular that they can get back to there food storage. (Poisoning peanut butter butter works but it is usually too quick.)

From what I've learned mixing borax, corn meal and ground dry roasted peanuts is a tempting and deadly combo and it gets the poison back to the colony. Of course, you would have to be very careful trying this if you have animals. Placing borax along window and door cracks keeps them from getting in - good luck.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Terro has actually worked pretty well with these ants, who seem to go for both sweets and protein. They swarm the Terro traps quite nicely. Maybe it really is excess sugar in my blood that's attracting them, but that does sound odd to me because my diabetes is under good control and my blood sugar levels are only borderline high most of the time.

We've had these ants for years, and it doesn't seem possible to get rid of them for good. There are too many ways for them to get in to the apartment that I can't close off easily. I find they don't seem to like coffee grounds, though.