The Recent Introduction Of Raspberry Ants To Texas:

It's been years since the red imported fire ant first made an appearance, and the situat is still not entirely under conl. Now a new spec has arrived. They are known as `crazy rberry ants' and they are concentrated in 8 count in and around Houston. The ants have been in Texas since 2002, but their growth has exploded in the past year, with three more count added to the list of those already infed.

The ants are ced "crazy" because they scurry about in a seemingly random pattern, and they're ced `rberry' not for their appearance, but for Tom Rberry, the p conller who first discovered them six years ago.

Unlike the much-reviled fire ant, the crazy rberry ants don't sting and their bite is relatively inoffensive. But this doesn't mean these ants don't cause problems. W they lack in bite, they make up for in sheer numb. When crazy rberry ants inf a property, they tend do so in spectacular fash. An infat can number in the bills of ants, and once an infat is ablished, property own find them extremely difficult to conl.

Usuy the size of an ant colony is held in check by other colon of the same spec-- of them competing for the same resources. If an ant from one colony encount an ant from another, they will start a fight, often to the death. Colon may also mount massive raids against one another. No so with the Rberry ants. Different colon of rberry ants are not hostile to each other, but instead treat one another as if they were n mates. This means t Rberry ants throughout Texas are just on big happy family, creating w is in effect a single, enormous, statewide "super colony." Without checks from other memb of their spec and without any natural predators, the Rberry ants can achieve an almost total environmental conl.

When the ants enter homes or industrial sites, they're often drawn to the warm buzz of electrical equipment. Their diminutive size, about 3 mm, means t when teeming masses of them crawl across a circuit board, they can f between the spaces of electrical elements, closing the loop and shorting out connects. They have damaged pumping stats, fire alarms, and ponal comput. They've even made an unsuccessful play for NASA's Johnson space center.

It's clear t the crazy rberry ants are having an impact on the environment. They kill many other insects, including fire ants and snakes, which has earned them some friends. However, they have also been reported to overwhelm newly ched birds and sm mammals.

Still, much more research needs to be done to determine the lasting environmental consequences of their explos. One of the basic problems of invasive spec is t other spec in the regs have not evolved to deal with them. So they can severely affect the numb of resident spec t live in the area. Still the ants seem to have fen into a regulatory hole.

So w's being done to conl these ants? Bryan Black from the Texas Department of Agriculture says t these ants can be conlled using Termidor, a picide used to conl termites. Recently, at the requ of Tom Rberry, the TDA has expanded labeling of this product to ow p conll to use it in significantly larger quantit when combating rberry ants.