Armies of ants could be enlisted in war on climate change

What if you could build a brick fence in your backyard that would offset a portion of your daily carbon dioxide emissions, such as those produced on your drive home from work? Would you do it?

Ronald Dorn, professor of geography at Arizona State University in Tempe, would. Except the fence he has in mind wouldn’t be just constructed from any old brick. It would be coated with calcium or magnesium and inhabited by a colony of ants.

If this idea sounds bizarre to you, that’s probably because—as Dorn himself would admit—it is. Yet, he says, it is conceivable that people all over the world could one day use their own version of this mineral/ant–based method of CO2 capture to limit the gas in the atmosphere and thereby help control its global heating effects.

CO2 is currently the primary greenhouse gas emitted via human activities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Overview of Green House Gases. And the volume released has only increased since the industrial revolution, contributing to global warming.

Using ants to help capture CO2 and help fight global warming stems from a study Dorn published recently in Geology linking ants to the acceleration of natural carbon dioxide absorption in rock by up to 335 times, compared with absorption in ant-free areas.

Responding to the study, David Schwartzman, emeritus professor of biogeochemistry at Howard University who reviewed but was not a part of the research, said that encouraging ant colonization “will be important in carbon sequestration” from the atmosphere.

Of course, both he and Dorn note, the ants themselves may not always be necessary once researchers learn more about how the insects promote carbon sequestration. “I don’t know if you can just have massive ant colonies hanging around a power plant. But if we know what particular secretion of an ant gland is doing this trick, or combinations of secretions,” Dorn says, then those substances could potentially be produced in quantity.