Ants do love to consume dandruff as a good source of protein. They will get it from your clothes, your everyday items, your car, your bed, and all over your house or street.
Among all the places ants can collect dandruff, the most common place you can see this is on your bathroom floor. Ants will go there and clean the place up. Every little bit of dandruff they can get their little paws on, they will take it.
Ants only do this when they have no other resources nearby, otherwise, they’ll just ignore it, as there are better resources to consume.
Why Do Ants Eat Dandruff?
The dandruff flakes are essentially dead skin cells, and cells are made of protein and other nutrients. If dandruff carries fungi, it can be another reason for ants to eat dandruff.
If dandruff is a nearby source of food, ants will take it away. Every resource is precious to an ant colony, this is why even dandruff can be used as an energy resource.
Do Ants Eat Shed Skin?
Ants love to eat shed skin, you can observe this phenomenon, especially in bathrooms. They will carry away the shed skin leaving no bit behind. But if you permit this enough, you’ll get an ant infestation in no time.
Why Do Ants Eat Psoriasis Flakes?
The flakes in psoriasis are just like any other dead cell, that is shed from our body. Ants see psoriasis flakes as any other food resource out there. They will gather it as a healthy resource for the colony.
Do Ants Eat Human Hair?
Ants are able to eat human hair like any other food resource. They are attracted to the excessive sebum on the human scalp, this aspect makes hair and hair follicles very attractive for them to eat.
Will Ants Get In Your Hair?
Every time you are going to your bathroom and brush your teeth, shower, clean your hands and comb your hair, you are creating opportunities to attract ants to you. Ants will be attracted to our chemical odors and body scents. Ants can indeed get in your hair, but it’s very unlikely to happen.
Do Ants Eat Scalp?
Ants will eat scalp (or dead skin cells) like any other human cell waste. It’s not uncommon for ants, to use our dead skill cells as a protein intake, generating energy and food for all the individual ants in a colony.
Can Ants Live on Your Head?
It is true that ants could potentially live in our head (or scalp) but please bear in mind two things:
- Ants can cause a lot of itch in the skin and that is no exception for your head, so even if one or two reach there, you probably will kill them when scratching that itch.
- Ants would not survive a shower at all, even if they do survive, they would fall when you are showering, ants aren’t physically built to hold on to human hair. Sure, they can carry it but aren’t able to stick in with a hair during such an amount of water pressure.
Sometimes they can get on your skin, just because they are curious, but will ants feel pain when you shake them off?
Do Ants Eat Fingernails?
The insects are able to break down our fingernails and make them useful for the colony and other ants. Ants can break human toenails into tiny little particles, and then eat them as a good source of keratin.
This will promote more energy and power for their own bodies. They like to chew toenails up and feed them to their larvae.
Nail clippings can also contain other nutrients like dead skin, nail fungus, and other organic substances attached to them, this alone makes them worthwhile to collect.
Ants can be attracted to a lot of human segregations, much more than you could ever imagine. They are not worried if it is gross. As long as it provides a survival opportunity for them, they will consume every little bit of resource that you produce with your body.
What Attracts Ants in the Bathroom?
One of the main reasons why ants get attracted to bathrooms are:
- Food sources
- Odors
- Moisture
- Excessive Water
- Fermented Human Hair in Drains
- Dead Skin Cells
It’s not random that bathrooms are one of the most common places that ants hang out in homes. There are so many resources in there, that they can’t just say no to them.
How to get rid of ants in the bathroom
Sometimes it may not be that easy to get rid of ants, especially in the bathroom. But with the right measures, you can get rid of them with ease.
- Identify key attraction points that are leading the ants into your bathroom and eliminate them by cleaning, preventing, and eliminating them.
- Follow the ant trail, and see where it leads to. Is it going outside? Or is it inside your home? Discover the source and eliminate it.
- If the source is outside or in an inaccessible place, see if you can seal the entrance and barricade the ants’ entrance.
Conclusion
Sometimes it may seem extremely gross what ants are able to do (and eat) to survive. As we could see before, ants will eat dandruff-like there is no tomorrow. Despite it can be gross for us humans, remember that these acts sometimes may be the difference between a living or a dead colony.
If you truly don’t want ants eating dandruff scattered all around your place, start preventing it from happening, because now you know it is possible.