As people move plants, soil and goods around the world, insects including ants often hitch a ride, making themselves at home in new regions. A recent study finds that some of these nonnative ants, currently restricted to warmer indoor environments like buildings or greenhouses, could easily spread outdoors as global temperatures rise, raising concerns for the local ecology. For the study, researchers extracted information on 323 types of nonnative ants across 477 different regions. They classified the ants as “indoor-restricted” if they were only found indoors, in buildings or greenhouses; or as “naturalized” if they had also been recorded outdoors. The researchers then collected data including temperature and rainfall patterns for each region to understand how climate influenced the ants’

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