The Scale and The Ant
The Scale & The Ant
The leaves of the ornamental lime (not really a lime but more a kumquat tree) had turned black. “It wasn’t like this the other day”, said Willow, now visibly distressed, looking at what appeared like an apocalyptic invasion. The leaves were sticky and covered in what looked like soot from an old steam train. “No stream trains around here, though”, he pondered.
Later he had a chance to discuss this with Kai on the phone, explaining what he saw. Kai asked if there were ants in the tree. Willow confirmed there were ants in the tree. He asked if there were tiny, flat insects, almost the colour of the leaves. There were. Then Kai told Willow the story of the ant and the scale insect.
The scale insect is blind, and it can’t move by itself. The ant is opportunistic and loves indenturing slaves to get what it wants but cannot do itself. An ant will carry a scale insect on its back up the tree and place it on a leaf where it will stay. The scale sticks its sucker into the leaf and starts sucking. A sticky, sweet excess residue starts to cover the whole leaf. The ant wants this, so it hovers around fussing and protecting the scale insect. Not that the scale really needs saving. It has a hard shell. It is all but irremovable. The sticky residue produced by the scale is food for the ant but also attracts a black mould from the atmosphere. This is the soot from the train. It blackens the leaves. The ants leave it behind when they carry the sticky residue. The black stops the leaves from receiving sunlight, and so the leaves wither. Suddenly with an infestation of these little creatures working in unison, the leaves all go black and cannot get energy sugars from the sun, so the tree starts to die off. In this way, ants are like rich people of a more greedy nature who serve their own immediate interests at the expense of the life of the very infrastructure they bleed.
Kai says we can treat this tree and save it. Dish soap diluted in water sprayed all over the tree a couple of times will remove the ants. They cannot digest the soap, and it stops them in their tracks. This also cleans the leaves, and they can breathe again and do their essential photosynthesis work.
Now that the ants are gone, their accomplices need to be removed. It is up to Willow to find a non-synthetic way to remove them that will not harm the balance on the organic farm. He tries ‘liquid smoke’, and it works. Saving the one and only Kumquat tree on the farm was an achievement, and learning about the ant and the scale and their symbiotic relationship — self-serving as itis — and entirely unsustainable as it is was a window into how nature can break down nature and often does.
© Jonathan Wright, 5EyesFarm, June 2023
