I'm not sure if ants actually eat any of the plant, but for the reasons you guys listed above, they arent usually very welcome!
In addition to making a portion of the soil waterproof and impenetrable to new roots, they will also kill or destroy fine feeder roots in the area of their nest. I'm fairly certain they also change soil chemistry to make it unfavable to new root growth in the area of their nest.
I think a big misconception is when there's ants in a pot, that it has a nest in it, the reality is that these pots only contain a few chambers of a nest system, very rarely will a pot be large enough to contain an entire nest, with a queen, this is good and bad.
If a group of ants is large enough and has no queen, they don't just die, but rather, they will produce another queen, so it's possible to make your ant problem worse when you bring pots in.
That's not normally going to happen, most times the ants aren't in the house long enough to do it, usually the different groups of ants will spend several months napping their new surroundings and trying to find the old colony, which they often do!
Then the pots become little outposts all around your house, giving them shelter all over the place...
The flip side of all this is that there was a time that I believed ants to be positive for my plants, at this time all I grew was c&s.
When they got moved in for the cold the ants would reveal themselves, moving them freaks em out.
I noticed that the African succulents that had ants in them year after year where outgrowing the ones that had no ants.
This experiment had far too many variables to count on, so don't take it to the bank...
I'm gunna suggest again, diatomaceous earth!
To us it's just dust, to bugs, it's doom!
It's very likely to be the powder the exterminators use at Jonnas place,
It really tears em up!
