poetrychic

Title
crazy raspberry ants swarm houston

Link
Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics - Yahoo! News
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Excerpt

DALLAS - In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants" — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

"They're itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they're just running everywhere," said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. "There's just thousands and thousands of them. If you've seen a car racing, that's how they are. They're going fast, fast, fast. They're crazy."

The ants — formally known as "paratrenicha species near pubens" — have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.

"At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed," said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.

But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

"The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

At the same time, the ants aren't taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

"It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms," said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents' home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

"This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger," said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.

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Comment:



frankly, i hope they do something about that before these ants decide to hop aboard some airplanes heading out of houston hobby causing plane crashes and infecting other areas of the country...

what do you guys think, should they loosen the restriction on stronger pesticides for this purpose?

__________________
"it was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation, yes we can!"

Jonesy

Man vs. Beast. I think it must be an ant-coup. We've suspected them for some time.

All the human intelligence in the world can only devise the same strategy - kill.

Rollerball

I found this map of their progress since 2002




Are they using public transportation? That's a lot of distance to cover with tiny little legs!

__________________
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

Jonesy

Could there be a mutually beneficial solution? Maybe they work-for-food?

poetrychic

rollerball, that's an interesting map...perhaps they are hitching a ride somehow, houston is a pretty large area...though, if there are indeed billions and billions of them, maybe they just covered that much space because of the need to spread out

what i find interesting is how they use their dead..turning them into bridges in order to escape a poisoned route etc. those are some freaky smart/evolved ants...

__________________
"it was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation, yes we can!"

ciaobox2007

I hope this guy doesn't live there.

__________________
what's the ratio of schrute bucks to stanley nickels?

Rollerball

If you notice, they DID go into hiding for two years between sightings in 2002 and 2005. What were they up to?

Maybe you're right, they spread out that much just because there are so many of them. If they weren't so small we'd notice an infestation that size before it spread. Maybe if we dose them with radiation they'd grow like 12 ft tall, then we'd notice them. They wouldn't be able to get away with nothing then.

__________________
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

The_Heretic

White McFaing: "Well hey, what-up guys... awh! C'mon guys! You already brought the network to its knees! What the fuck! Shit, alright hand over your statement... No! I'm not reading' this shit- alright, alright, alright! Put down the blow torch, I'll do it! Ahh, wait! Jesus! Could you write any fuckin' smaller!?"

"Okay, here we are, 'We of teh Grass Cutters Ants Union, Local 354957284106 stand in solidarity with our "Crazy Raspberry" Ant sisters. In fact we demand that "crazy" not be used as a species slur of their methodology and that they be allowed to shirk off their slave name of Raspberry. They must be given the right of self determination to seek out a dystiny fit for their lifestyle. This extends to their entry into Johnson's Space Center where they can plan an exodus from this world and away from vertebrate domination.'"

"Oh, and they got this propaganda poster that I'm suppose to hold up."



"They got one other thing to say, 'Mess with the Nest, die like the rest.' This from the Grass Cutter Ants Union, Local 354957284106. This is Whitey McFang- likely kissing my own journalism career goodbye, and you're being permitted to watch Heretical News Network."

__________________

John McCain: "He's in Iraq... with a few centuries to kill."

babylonDon

They don't taste anything like raspberries.

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"America, the greatest, best country that God has ever given man, on the face of the Earth"- Sean Hannity, professional broadcast journalist.

“To the contrary, has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”-Antonin Scalia

Kanadesaga

My god man! have you never seen Them? Oh the devastation, oh the humanity!

__________________
"Soldiers lose their voice when they enlist. My sons spoke of that before they did enlist. That that, was a reality. And the public is their voice." Mary Tillman 5/9/08