good challenge mike. it is my observations, ive never noticed anything dry in a red ant nest. not sure what its like else where but in the summer if we cut into red ant nests often times millions (litterally) of ants boil out. it is always moist. i beleive its a fair assesment but i know of no studies to back it up. never crossed my mind before but ill try and get a vid this summer
Ants need a moist environment. They don't eat wood. They cant, or don't, chew into healthy wood.
So before ants move in, they need an opening and they need damp, soft, decaying wood. That's why you don't get ants living in your firewood, unless it's wet and rotting. And once you split and stack the wood to dry, the ants leave, they have to, they need that moisture.
This should also tell Al something, if the ants need moist decaying wood, why is it the ants that caused the tree to fall, and not the decay?
Look carefully at the picture on page 1. Can you see the dark line in the wood that separates the decay from the white colored wood? That is a CODIT wall. A chemical and physical barrier to decay, set up by the tree in response to injury.
Look closely, there are no ant holes on the healthy side of that line. The ants can't, or don't want to, chew through that CODIT wall. The injury was there first, the tree sets up the CODIT walls and abandons the wood inside the wall, fungus weakens the wood inside the wall, ants move into the moist decaying wood inside the wall.
If everything works, the wood inside the wall gets consumed by fungus and other micro-organisms, or pushed outside the tree by ants, other insects, birds or squirrels, and it becomes hollow. Depending on the severity, it may close up and be forgotten, get worse and cause tree failure, or something in between.
