| 1 | | IT SOUNDS like the plot of a far-fetched 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-bent on 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. |
| 2 | | 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. |
| 3 | | 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.” Crazy |
| | is 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 investigator, Tom Rasberry, who first identified them. |
| 4 | | The ants 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 [id:86588] 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. |
| 5 | | But, 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 also bite humans – |
| | although not with a sting like fire ants. |
| 6 | | 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 says that it is working with researchers from A&M |
| | University and the Environmental Protection Agency to find new ways to [id:86592] the |
| | ants. |
