To make a spider flee, bring on the fire ants. Or rather, just their chemical signals.
Some spiders common in North American homes avoid building their webs in chambers that recently housed European fire ants, researchers report May 19 in Royal Society Open Science. The ants probably left behind chemical traces, the researchers say. That could signal danger to the arachnids because ants sometimes feast on spiders. The reaction hints that the insects might be a source of natural spider-repelling chemicals.
“A lot of people are afraid of spiders, and there’s nothing on the market that is reliable that keeps the spiders away,” says Andreas Fischer, an arachnologist at
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