In Orges, a municipality in the canton of Vaud with a population of 425, there is a silent enemy that has been causing problems for the street lighting for years. It is not a technical fault, nor is it a problem with the electricity supply. It is ants.
It turns out that these insects, attracted by the heat given off by the lighting systems, crawl inside the street lamps, build their nests, carry sand through the tunnels and eventually cause the electrical components to stop working. The municipality of Orges discovered this after calling the electrician two or three times a year to ask what was going on.
According to the curator of the Musée cantonal des sciences naturelles in Lausanne, the electrical installations give off exactly the kind of heat that the ants seek to create an environment similar to that of their natural anthill. And the small access holes are perfect for them to enter and build. The local council spends a few hundred francs a year on repairs. It’s no great tragedy, but it’s one of those problems that nobody had anticipated and which science has to step in to explain.
20min.ch published this on 27 July. I’m not sure what strikes me as most Swiss: that the problem is ants, that someone has seriously investigated why, or that the answer comes from a cantonal natural history museum.