Ants can speed up mineral reactions that capture atmospheric carbon dioxide so dramatically that they could one day be enlisted in the fight against climate change.
Has anyone tried planting more trees (oh & stopping to cut down the ones we still have) before resorting to potentially creating a Planet of the Ants catastrophe type scenario? Just sayin'...
Whoa whoa whoa... In your backyard? As someone whose property has a small colony of ants, I cannot tell you how stupid this would be. The risk of them getting out is too great. You might think of ants as an "annoyance", but they are more dangerous than that. About a year ago they got into a very large tree without my knowledge, weakened it severely, then half of the tree fall on my neighbor's garage destroying the whole thing during a storm. It wouldn't have fallen if they didn't infect the tree, and it looked like it was in good shape on the outside. Luckily nobody was hurt and insurance took care of everything except my tree (I had to pay for the rest of the tree to be removed even though it was endangering my house by leaning over a power line). 90% of the time my neighbor is in that garage. It is his man-cave and workshop. He could have been killed. For the love of god don't fuck around with ants in your yard. I'm not saying you have to go exterminate them all immediately I'm just saying don't intentionally add any extra risk of getting a colony in your yard. If there is genuinely a benefit to ants doing this on the environment, let this guy do the research and also let them put these things on different properties other than your backyard. You personally don't have to solve your carbon footprint, I'm kind of sick of seeing people "offsetting" their footprint by hand. People are working on larger scale operations that will solve everyone's. Trying to solve your environmental guilt is pointless without getting everyone else to do it with you, and trust me, nobody will join you just because you did it. If you want to save the environment, start doing research and development of new technologies that will do so on a large scale. If you can't do that, then let other people take the stage and move on. If you feel guilty about the environment then you should feel guilty of about 1000 other things you do on a daily basis as well, so don't beat yourself up over it. You are going to pollute at the current state of technology, learn to accept that and use that knowledge productively instead of recklessly trying to solve everything NOW NOW NOW! Keep calm and carry on. If you don't keep calm, you'll end up dying of stress and anxiety before you can make any difference.