In this photo provided by Mississippi State Entomological Museum, a worker Nylanderia pubens (ant) specimen is seen in Starkville, Miss., Friday, Nov. 6, 2009. 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. They’re called hairy because of dense “hair” that, to the naked eye, make them look less glossy than their cousins.
Next time your Aunt Teabag or Uncle Dittohead asks “what’s the big deal about being a few degrees warmer?” – show them this video. Note: put hot coffee down before viewing.
It sounds like a horror movie: Biting ants invade by the millions. A camper’s metal walls bulge from the pressure of ants nesting behind them. A circle of poison stops them for only a day, and then a fresh horde shows up, bringing babies. Stand in the yard, and in seconds ants cover your shoes.
It’s an extreme example of what can happen when the ants — which also can disable huge industrial plants — go unchecked. Controlling them can cost thousands of dollars. But the story is real, told by someone who’s been studying ants for a decade.
“Months later, I could close my eyes and see them moving,” said Joe MacGown, who curates the ant, mosquito and scarab collections at the Mississippi State Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University.
He’s been back to check on the hairy crazy ants. They’re still around. The occupant isn’t.
The flea-sized critters are called crazy because each forager scrambles randomly at a speed that your average picnic ant, marching one by one, reaches only in video fast-forward. They’re called hairy because of fuzz that, to the naked eye, makes their abdomens look less glossy than those of their slower, bigger cousins.
Texas A&M University reports that “Effective products involved with the treatments are not readily available to the consumer. If you suspect your house or property is infested with these ants, call a professional pest control provider. After treatment, or when making multiple applications over time, piles of dead ants must be swept or moved out of the area in order to treat the surface(s) underneath.”
The A&M factsheet also notes – “..it is a semi-tropical ant and potential northern distribution will be limited by cooler weather conditions.”
Well, not for long.
Your fears are misplaced, Peter. Not everything is caused by climate.
A few tenths of a degree of warming would not change the prospective range of these bugs by much. Moreover, it’s winter chill, not cool summers, that limits most warmth-loving critters’ range, and, in case you haven’t noticed, n. hemisphere winters have been getting colder the last few years.
“n. hemisphere winters have been getting colder the last few years”
Convenient lies. GISS data shows otherwise:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=08&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=1203&year1=1980&year2=2011&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Dave, weather is not climate; temperature trends over “the last few years” have no significance to climate. For a variety of complicated reasons, the time scale to use to differentiate climate from weather is about 30 years, and over that time scale, we’ve definitely had warmer winters, as well as hotter summers.
Moreover, the simple fact that these ants are now appearing in areas that they previously had not inhabited is itself the evidence that their range is northering. Biologists have already assembled mountains of evidence of many species’ ranges shifting northward. This is established evidence, not conjecture.