CRAZY COMPUTER EATING ANTS

 
Billions of electronic-eating 'crazy rasberry ants' invade Texas

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
Tom Rasberry, the exterminator, with the alien ants he first identified asa
problem






Chris Ayres in Los Angeles

 
It sounds like the plot of a farfetched science fiction movie. Unfortunately  
for the residents of Texas, it is very much a reality: billions of tiny  
reddish-brown ants have arrived onshore from a cargo ship and are hell-benton  
eating anything electronic.  
Computers, burglar alarm systems, gas and electricity meters, iPods,  
telephone exchanges – all are considered food by the flea-sized ants, for reasons
that have left scientists baffled.  
Having ruined pumps at a sewage facility, the ants are now marching towards  
Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre and William P. Hobby airport, Houston, putting
state officials in a panic. “They’re itty-bitty things, and they’re just
running everywhere,” said Patsy Morphew, a resident of Pearland, on the Gulf Coast.
 
She spends hours 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.”  
 
 
Related Links

 
 
* _Metrosexual ant recolonises Australia _
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article468979.ece)

* _Ask the Experts: The exterminator _
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/article381163.ece)








Crazy is the the right word. The ants are known as “crazy rasberry ants”:  
crazy because they seem to move in a random scrum as opposed to marching in  
regimented lines, and rasberry after a pioneering exterminator, Tom Rasberry,  
who first identified them as a problem.  
The ants – also known as paratrenicha species near pubens –have so far
spread to five counties in the Houston area. Scientists are not sure from where
they originate but they seem to be related to a type of ant from the  
Caribbean. “At this point it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ants because
they are so widely dispersed,” said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University
entomologist. He added that the only upside to the invasion was that the crazy
rasberry ants ate fire ants, which sting humans during the long, hot Texas
summers.  
Unfortunately, the ants also like to suck the moisture from plants, feed on  
precious insects such as ladybirds and eat the hatchlings of a small,
endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken. They alsobite
humans – although not with a sting like fire ants.  
Perhaps their most remarkable characteristic, however, is that they are  
attracted to electrical equipment. Pest control specialists say that they are  
inundated with calls from homes and businesses now that the warm, humid season  
has begun, with literally billions of the ants wreaking havoc across the state.
Worse, the ants refuse to die when sprayed with over-the-counter poison.
Even killing the queen of a colony doesn’t do any good, because each colony has  
multiple queens.  
The Texas Department of Agriculture said that it was working with researchers
from A&M University and the Environmental Protection Agency to find new ways
to stop the ants.


 

 

 
 
* _Have your say_
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3941545.ece#comments-form)




 
What's causing things like this to happen are unchecked globalization, a
lack of inspections of goods imported from countries where the governmentshave
no regard for anyone, especially their own people. It needs to end.

Jenny, Grand Rapids, MI, US







   


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