Diet
A. gracilipes has been described as a “scavenging predator” and has a broad diet, a characteristic of many invasive species. It consumes a wide variety of foods including grains, seeds, arthropods, and decaying matter, including vertebrate corpses. They have been reported to attack and dismember invertebrates such as small isopods, myriapods, molluscs, arachnids, land crabs, earthworms and insects.
Like all ants, A. gracilipes requires a protein-rich food source for the queen to lay eggs and carbohydrates as energy for the workers. They get their carbohydrates from plant nectar and honeydew producing insects, especially scale insects, aphids, and other Sternorrhyncha. Studies indicate that crazy ants rely so much on the scale insects that scarcity of them can actually limit ant population growth.
Read more about this topic: Yellow Crazy Ant
Famous quotes containing the word diet:
“Literary tradition is full of lies about poverty—the jolly beggar, the poor but happy milkmaid, the wholesome diet of porridge, etc.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I’m on a diet from death.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)