Attack of the stupid ANTS in Houston - damages electronics

Attack of the stupid ANTS in Houston - damages electronics

By Linda Stewart Ball, Associated Press
DALLAS - In what sounds like a very small budget horror film, swarming ants voracious who apparently came to Texas aboard a cargo ship invade homes and yards in the Houston area, a short-boxes Electrical and playing computers.

The furry, reddish-brown creatures are known as "mad raspberry ants" - mad, because they wander erratically instead of walking in regimented lines, and "raspberry" after Tom Framboise, an exterminator who did battle against them from the outset.

"They are Itty-bitty things on the size of fleas, and they are just running everywhere," said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, which continues to sweep the accounts of his patio and scooping out of the pool by the cupful . "There are just thousands and thousands of them. If you saw a race car, so they are. They are quick, quick, quick. They are crazy."

The ants - officially known as "paratrenicha species near pubens" - have been extended to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The new species is estimated to be recognized arrived in a shipment of cargo through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants come, but their cousins, commonly called mad ants, located in the South-East Asia and the Caribbean.

"At this stage it would be almost impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed," said Roger Gold, a Texas A & M University entomologist.


The good news? They eat ants, tingling terror red Texas summers.

But ants also sucking the sweet juice plants, feed on these insects like ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small type of danger grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, but not with a dart like ants.

Worse still, they, like other species of ants are attracted by electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They ruined pumps sewage pumping stations, computers and polluted at least one owner of the gas meter, fire and caused the malfunction alarms. They were spotted by NASA Johnson Space Center and near the Hobby airport, even if they have not caused major problems still there.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasingly because the ants - which are beginning to emerge by the billions with the arrival of the heat, wet season - seem to be resistant to the over-the-counter ant killers.

"The people set up so high that controls typical ant has simply not good," said Jason Meyers, an A & M doctoral student who is writing his thesis on the eighth of an inch along ant.

It is not enough to kill the queen. Experts say that each colony has several queens to be taken.

At the same time, the ants do not take the bait usually on the sidelines in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to ease restrictions on the use of pesticides more powerful.

And when you kill these ants, the survivors turn to their advantage: they accumulate the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely on surfaces treated with pesticides.

"It looks that someone has come along and coffee spilled all around the perimeter of rooms," said Lisa Calhoun, exterminators who paid $ 1200 to treat an infestation of his parents home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A & M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

"It seems like lava flowing filling and an entire area, making more and more," said Ron Harrison, director of training for the great struggle against the harmful company Orkin Inc.