The South welcomes 'crazy ants.' Hail the latest invader.

'Crazy ants' from South America are hitching rides across the South, setting up massive colonies, and relieving other occupying ant armies, including fire ants, of their duties.

|
Joe MacGown/Mississippi State Entomological Museum/AP
Hairy 'crazy ants' are on the move in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The flea-sized critters are called crazy because each ant in the horde seems to scramble randomly, moving so fast that videos look as if they're on fast forward.

The South is being invaded – again. This time it’s erratic but troublesome “crazy ants” from South America marching – actually, hitching rides – across the South, setting up massive colonies, and relieving other occupying ant armies, including fire ants, of their duties.

With billions of ants possible per acre, crazy ants, known for their random, jerky travel, eat or chase away most other insects and reptiles, and hound yard pets inside. In single numbers pretty innocuous-looking, tiny tawny crazy ants also make pests out of themselves by sometimes biting people and shorting out home electrical wiring.

The question now is if there’s room enough in the South for the newcomers, or whether the United States needs to invest in research to figure out how to stop the “tawny crazy ant,” as well as its cousins, the “black crazy ant,” and the “Caribbean crazy ant,” before they’re ubiquitous.

“The entire Gulf Coast is going to be inundated in a very short period of time,” entomologist Tom Rasberry, who found and identified the crazy ants in 2002, recently told a local CBS News broadcast.

Having already spread in the span of a decade from a bunch of counties surrounding Houston to as far away as Florida, crazy ant success so far is entirely due to their hitchhiking skills. A few ants clambering aboard at a truck stop in Waco, Texas, may soon find themselves starting a colony in Covington, Georgia. They thrive best in warmer, moister locales, which means the South is stuck with them.

But as with most invasive species, “crazy ants” can have unexpected, sometimes paradoxical, impacts on their conquered ground. Fire ants, which were accidentally introduced in the 1930s and now pretty much own the South, apparently can’t stand “crazy ants,” and retreat from the conquering horde, as do most other ant species.

And despite oftentimes legitimate cries of concern from the scientific community about the dangers of invasive plants and animals in the US, many one-time strangers-to-these-parts – kudzu, snakeheads, boas, Yankees – become, at least in the eyes of some Southerners, manageable pests, part of an ever-changing backdrop of wildlife at the door.

This being the South, even scientists have sought out biblical insights into how to view the invasion, including this from Proverbs 6:6-8 cited in a Texas A&M research paper about invasive ants: “Go to the ant, O sluggard/ Observe her ways and be wise/ It has no commander/ No overseer or ruler.” 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to The South welcomes 'crazy ants.' Hail the latest invader.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0518/The-South-welcomes-crazy-ants.-Hail-the-latest-invader
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe