Crazy Ants Not Limited to Texas

Lacking the natural predators of their native habitats, invasive species like crazy ants can overrun an area and, in extreme cases, cause the extinction of native species. They are also expensive to fight.

It turns out the crazy ants found in Texas have made Florida their home for decades. The “Paratrechina pubens,” are exotic invaders better known as Caribbean crazy ants.

Named for their point of origin and their erratic movement, Caribbean crazy ants do not sting and rarely bite. That’s the good news.

The bad news: No one knows how to get rid of them. And there is no concerted effort to study the insects, which have been found in most of Florida.

First sighted in Miami and Coral Gables in 1953, the Caribbean crazies have spread widely. Severe infestations have been recorded around Lake Okeechobee and in West Palm Beach, Jacksonville and Miami.

Scientists know very little about the ants, although they have pieced together a few biological and behavioral characteristics, mostly from field observations.

Crazy ants build super colonies. While fire ants live in single mounds of perhaps a couple thousand individuals, Caribbean crazies gather in hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Each nest can have multiple queens.

Foragers from different nests do not mind mingling, and an infested area generally has multiple nests, which can be found under leaves, in old fire ant mounds, or even in cars.

Often, the nests cannot be found, because the ants seem to forage over great distances. Ants that show up in one yard could be coming from nests as far as a half-mile away, hindering eradication.

Crazy ants appear to be protein-feeders, eating other insects, plant juices and the occasional bird hatchling. By their sheer numbers, the crazies eat or drive out just about every other crawling insect in their territory.

That is every beetle, every ant, every spider.

“What I’ve seen with the crazy ants beats everything,” says Phil Koehler, professor of entomology at the University of Florida. “You can kill billions of them and not make any headway. You can kill them 3 inches deep and the survivors just move over them.”

Actually, killing them is easy: They succumb to a number of common pesticides. But until research pinpoints their breeding and feeding habits, pest control operators are left with no sure protocols for eradication.

Koehler says $50,000 to $100,000 would finance some meaningful research, but one of the major sources for grants, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has not recognized Caribbean crazy ants as a threat to livestock or crops.

Nor have the ants caught the interest of chemical companies, which sponsor research in hope of developing products for sale.

Source: www2.tbo.com