WBUR has the definitive review of Monday's area-wide aerial ant orgy, including an interview with a myrmecologist who thinks the ants were a species known as "Labor Day ants" because of when they typically swarm - although still unresolved is the question of why so many of them decided to swarm all at once across a broad area.
A disgusted Jamaica Plain resident filed a 311 complaint this afternoon after city workers refused to pick up an old chair out at the curb, because, according to the orange note they left behind, it was covered in bedbugs when, the kvetcher complains, it was actually covered in dead ants from yesterday's extreme aerial ant orgy across much of the area: Read more.
Vero Navarro of Hyde Park managed to capture just one of the ants, between her home's back door and its screen door, this evening.
Jamaica Plain, Roslindale and Hyde Park Facebook groups tonight are full of accounts of people and vehicles getting stuck in a mating frenzy of zillions of tiny flying ants, in those neighborhoods and West Roxbury and Dedham, too (Update: Cambridge and Somerville, too). Read more.
Somebody in Cambridge is giving away a colony of C. pennsylvanicus, a variety of carpenter ants, complete with a formicarium: Read more.
BU Today took biology professor and ant expert James Traniello to see Ant-Man:
Traniello has spent his career studying the social behavior of ants, and is also - perhaps not surprisingly - a connoisseur of insect films. He gives Ant-Man an enthusiastic thumbs-up, though he had a few quibbles with the science.
Jef Taylor reported around 6:20 p.m.:
Big flying ant emergence happening in Dedham now. These at definitely ant alates, big females with distended abdomens and tiny darker males.
Colleen Dillon checked in not long after from Quincy:
BIG swarm In West Quincy!
You may recall the endless swarms of icky little bugs around the same time last year.
People all across greater Boston tonight are finding themselves deluged by a sudden onslaught of swarms of little bugs.
Megan Lee tweets:
There are a million tiny flying bugs covering my back door & porch. This is a bad sign isn't it?
In Brookline, Stephen Walsh tweets:
They are all over the cars on my street. Look like tiny fleas.
The Urban Pantheist treks through the woods of Dogtown, a Cape Ann village deserted after the Revoluation where Babson College founder (and anti-gravity promoter) Roger Babson later had stone cutters carve various inspirational messages on boulders. He also photographs an ant designed to give you nightmares:
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