Aaah! I've got ants in my room!

Aaah! I've got ants in my room! I don't know what they were looking for, because I've NEVER had food or drinks in my room. But they're everywhere in the corner of my room, so they must have found something! They're in my paperwork, and my college textbooks... I don't yet know where else they are. Question: Can ants damage any of the following if they get inside them or all over them?

-my PC, PS2, GameCube, NES, or Super NES
-my DVDs, CDs, or cartridges
-my Transformers collection (OK, the toys themselves are safe, since they're plastic and metal... but what about the boxes & instruction booklets???)
-books, I have a large collection of books which is pretty expensive

!!!

They should not damage any of those things. They are looking for food and those items are not food to them.

Well, I found the biggest group of them so far in a carboard box full of papers... it was an Amazon.com box I had DVDs delivered in, so it never had food nor drink in it... but those ants had bits of something they were trying to get out of that cardboard box and back to their nest (wherever that is)...

Could they have been taking little bits of the cardboard box, or some of the paper inside it, and using it for food?

I guess it depends on the type of ants you are talking about. I hear Texas has some quite large ants.

I know using ant poison of some kind is a duh statement. Outside of that, the only other annoyance I am aware of is the weird smell they produce if they are there for some time. Ants find their way around by leaving a trail of chemicals, it's also how they communicate. It will reek. I do not know if they will actually eat any paper atm, only if they are probably starving, since paper is plant cells compressed. I know they eat leaves, including tobbaco! (warning if you smoke, they will attack your smokes for munchies!) If these are North American Army Ants (Big red guys) then sprinkle some dryed oat meal, it makes their stomachs pop, first thing that will be done is for the food (the oat meal in this case) to be given to the queen. Using this or poison will destroy the colony's matriarch. Then the workers and soldiers will eat from it. Same thing happens. If they are coming in from a wall that faces outside, check outside on the other side of the wall, there might have been something there that got their attention, and they think there might be more on the other side. hope that helps out. I do not know of a quick fix for the tiny ones...

Afterthought from reading your newer post: If they are like little white things being carried around, those are larvea. Baby ants.. the workers are trying to move them to a safer place so they can grow up. Apparently the box may have been made into a nest before being sent out.

[Edited on 26-7-2004 by Crysstaafur]

Originally posted by jetsetter
I guess it depends on the type of ants you are talking about. I hear Texas has some quite large ants.

Well, these are little tiny ants... not big ants, or fire ants. Carpenter ants perhaps? I know nothing about ants, so I have no idea...

My wife, who is also a poster here (Hetha), told me that the dried oat meal thing will work with the tiny ones too!