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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCrazy Ants: Scary and coming soon to a neighborhood near you
Theres a Reason They Call Them Crazy Ants
The first time Mike the Hog-a-Nator noticed the ants, they were piled outside his cardiologists office. This was two summers ago, in Pearland, a suburb of Houston. There was a forbidding, fibrous heap of dead ants on either side of the buildings double doors, each a couple of feet long. And there were also legions of living ants shuffling over the dead ones though Mike the Hog-a-Nator had to bend down to see these. Otherwise, so many individual ants were moving so chaotically, and so fast, that the entire reddish-brown tangle at his feet looked as if it were shimmering. Mike the Hog-a-Nator remembers thinking: What the world? Then he went inside for his weekly appointment.
this is a pile of Crazy Ants:
Six years earlier, a doctor found a tumor on Mike the Hog-a-Nators aorta. It was inoperable. Mike, who was only 36, was told to live every day as if it were his last. He narrowed his joys and priorities to two. The first was putting smiles on the faces of people who need them, so he started a program he calls Therapy Through the Outdoors. Ever since, he has been taking kids with terminal diseases and veterans with injuries or PTSD on adventures in the 60-acre woodland across from his house. The other was shooting as many feral hogs as he possibly could, which is what he and the sick kids and the wounded warriors often do in the woods.
Mike hates feral hogs, and has always found it very satisfying to clear those hideous, rooting thugs off a piece of land. He has always been good at it too thats why people call him Mike the Hog-a-Nator. (His real name is Mike Foshee.) Recently, he even started marketing his own all-natural hog bait, Pork Smack Hog Attractant, after months of refining the recipe. America has been filling up with invasive species since European settlers first arrived. Feral hogs, which were brought to the continent five centuries ago, are among the most gruesome and destructive. The federal government estimates that there are now five million hogs in 35 states, resulting in $1.5 billion in damages and control costs every year. In its literature, the Department of Agriculture calls the animals a pandemic.
But anyway, the ants.
<snip>
Much more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy-ants.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2p
Lawd save us!
These would drive me bats*** crazy in one day.
Stargazer09
(2,132 posts)I can't stand ants.
I feel sorry for those living near those crazy things.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)is they eat fire ants!
I expect we will have them here soon, they are already in Fla.
Oh, and we have feral hogs, on the outskirts of town. 18 were found and killed couple weeks ago.
big doings for such a little town.
Historic NY
(37,453 posts)they just march in under a tiny threshold crack usually some spray and they get the message.
I wonder if cinnamon would work on them.
hollysmom
(5,946 posts)I use it to get rid of termites, might work here as well. just pour it into the soil around the building. Oh, and the chalk like works as well, ants don't like to cross chalk.
2naSalit
(86,780 posts)Hopefully it gets too cold for them to survive up here! We get a lot of tourists from TX, hope they don' bring any with them unknowingly.
RebelOne
(30,947 posts)they disappeared. And there were mounds of fire ants. One was in my front yard, and I saw many of them in a field down the street from my house. And they have all mysteriously disappeared. I have not seen any ants for about 5 years. I hope the crazy ants don't come up here to Georgia to replace them.
hunter
(38,327 posts)The ants have free reign so long as they stay out of the kitchen and don't farm scale-insects on the citrus.
I honestly think stable ant colonies can be taught. It's not intelligence as we know it, but the effect is the same.
I'm pretty sure if any fleas or cockroaches show up the ants and spiders simply eat them.