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Tom Rasberry and the "crazy rasberry
ants"
ants"
New Species of Ant Invades Texas, Attacks Computers
May 16, 2008 10:15 AM
Tiny ants descended from insect stowaways on a Houston-bound cargo ship wreak havoc on the city’s electronics.
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In 2002, “crazy rasberry ants” descended onto Houston through cargo ships and began to multiply.
The ants, named for Tom Rasberry, the first exterminator to tackle the growing problem, do not follow the traditional marching patterns of most ants, but waywardly attack electrical appliances, shorting out computers and causing fire alarms to malfunction, as they wander in disordered droves.
Scientists are not sure why they are attracted to electrical appliances or where the stowaways orginally came from, but a closely related species is found in the Caribbean.
Now, the reddish ants have spread to five Texas counties.
According to Popular Science, the ants are resistant to virtually every kind of traditional pest control. Additionally, “Even when individuals [ants] are killed, the survivors will smartly pile their dead over the pesticide-treated areas to cross to safety.”
One Houston resident explained her difficulty at keeping the tiny invaders at bay: “They just keep coming back. … I went down and bought Raid, and sprayed them, and they’d figure out where I sprayed, and just go around it.”
The state’s Department of Agriculture is working with Texas A&M University researchers and the EPA on a ways to stop the ant invasion. With warm, humid spring weather encouraging the bugs, “the population (is) built up so high that typical ant controls simply do no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M student who is doing his doctoral dissertation on the tiny ant.
The ants, named for Tom Rasberry, the first exterminator to tackle the growing problem, do not follow the traditional marching patterns of most ants, but waywardly attack electrical appliances, shorting out computers and causing fire alarms to malfunction, as they wander in disordered droves.
Scientists are not sure why they are attracted to electrical appliances or where the stowaways orginally came from, but a closely related species is found in the Caribbean.
Now, the reddish ants have spread to five Texas counties.
According to Popular Science, the ants are resistant to virtually every kind of traditional pest control. Additionally, “Even when individuals [ants] are killed, the survivors will smartly pile their dead over the pesticide-treated areas to cross to safety.”
One Houston resident explained her difficulty at keeping the tiny invaders at bay: “They just keep coming back. … I went down and bought Raid, and sprayed them, and they’d figure out where I sprayed, and just go around it.”
The state’s Department of Agriculture is working with Texas A&M University researchers and the EPA on a ways to stop the ant invasion. With warm, humid spring weather encouraging the bugs, “the population (is) built up so high that typical ant controls simply do no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M student who is doing his doctoral dissertation on the tiny ant.
Headline Link: Crazy rasberry ants invade Houston
The crazy rasberry ants are virtually unstoppable, having widely dispersed after arriving at a Houston port on a cargo boat in 2002. The ants are attracted to electrical appliances: “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,” the AP reports.
Source: The Huffington Post (AP)
Key Player: An unstoppable ant
According to the online version of Popular Science Magazine, the crazy rasberry ant has proved especially difficult to extinguish. The site explains that these ants are “not attracted to the usual poison bait traps and so require specialized extermination. The colonies are polygyne (having multiple queens) and may even be interconnected into supercolonies, making colony destruction nearly impossible.”
Source: Popsci.com (Popular Science Magazie)
NPR’s the Ramble details some of the characteristics of these Houstonian invaders: “they swarm, they’re hairy and they are unwanted.” Additionally, the “reddish-brown” ants have spread to five counties. Raspberry ants have cousins in the South East and the Carribean, NPR reports.
Source: NPR
Opinion & Analysis: Exterminator Tom Rasberry on the ants
Briebart News hosts this video clip from a Houston news station detailing the invasion of the ants. The station interviews Tom Rasberry, for whom the species is named. He was the first exterminator to begin fighting the ants in 2002. According to Rasberry, “You can kill them by the millions and even billions, but the problem is, you can’t kill all of them because their numbers are too high.”
Source: Brietbart TV
© 2008 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
