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Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics
By LINDA STEWART BALL, Associated Press Writer
6 minutes ago



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



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080514/ap_on_re_us/texas_ants

Seems like every creature that invades came here aboard a cargo ship.

You think they would require extermination before docking.

Quote:

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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.

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:rubs his hands together and emits a fiendish laugh:now where did I leave my enlarging ray gun?

I look for the locusts by fall and the rivers of blood by spring of '09.

Sounds like you need an army to fight these ants.

Why wasn't this posted under the Global Warming Thread?

BTW, I'm sure this thread will grow six legs and take off with some bad puns.

Jules should be back shortly ... she's usually the queen of these kinds of threads.

You just said that to bug me.

Yeah, you're right ... I said it to fire you up.

Don't go all crazy now.

Jules is famous for making a mountain out of an ant hill.

That's just how she was raised back on the farm.

I better feeler this thread out before I start the puns.

If Jules posts again can I pincher?

Isn't anybody else going to sink their mandibles into this thread?

Finding ant related words from the internet is cheating.

Oh don't get your metosoma in an uproar

You win.

Good I was afraid your exoskeleton was going to get all bent out of shape.

Thorax for the good laugh.

Your welcome "honey pot"

Sorry to derail a perfectly good punning...

I hate ants! They infest my home! Thank goodness for Orkin!

Just be glad they didn't bring the uncle's with them.











ohhhh that was bad

You should be. You had enough practice reading them

No need to get antsy.

Are you trying to "Bait" me ?

You're really starting to bug me.

Just don't go all Formica japonica on me, and start lifting five times your body weight