Under attack. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. The fire ants cower. They panic. The flies keep coming. Dive-bombing. Injecting eggs. No mercy. It’s a fight to the death.
And the flies always win.
Last week was a hot one here in Central Texas with a daily average high of about 100. Air conditioning is a must and both my upstairs and downstairs units had a full workout. Tuesday evening I woke up feeling a bit warm and checked the thermostat. It was set at 75° but the temperature was 82. I could hear the outside unit running and the fan was running but the system simply wasn’t putting out cold air. I instantly knew what the problem was. Fire ants. That’s right. Thousands of the nasty little critters had mounted a suicide attack on outside AC unit and had shut down the compressor. There is something about the harmonic hum of electricity that attracts the ants and they converge on the system by the thousands and become caramelized between the contacts. The next morning I called the AC repairman and scheduled a repair call. I was told that he would arrive promptly between 1:00 and 5:00 PM the following day. When he arrived, the repairman spent about 20 minutes installing new contacts and was on his way. Cost: 253 genuine Huck bucks.
Fire ants cause tens of millions of dollars in damage each year to electrical equipment and agricultural equipment throughout the South. Ranchers lose thousands of calves to ants every year. If a newborn calf is dropped anywhere near a fire ant mound, the ants will attack it going for the eyes. The calf is blinded and must be euthanized. Their bite is a double shot of pain as they will bite with their mandibles, hold onto the victim in a death grip and then inject venom with their stingers. They attack by the thousands.
Until recently, the only way to get rid of a fire ant mound was to use Amdro (a poison bait which the workers carry to the queen), boil ‘em or burn ‘em . Finally, researchers at The University of Texas and Texas A& M University have come up with an ingenious plan to effectively attack and control the fire ant population… The Phorid Fly. These tiny flies have only 2 goals in their short life spans; (1) procreate and (2) attack fire ants.
“Texans burn, drown, smash, poison and cuss red imported fire ants. But 20 years of research at The University of Texas reveals that one of the most effective weapons in our arsenal against these relentless invaders just might be—drum roll, please—tiny phorid flies.
The gray-brown, gnat-like insects from South America star in a scene straight from a B-grade horror movie. A female fly sneaks up behind an unsuspecting worker ant and lays an egg in its body. The egg hatches, and the larva moves into the ant’s head, sending the host ant out of the colony—zombie-like—to find a place to die. The ant’s head eventually falls off, providing a nice, hard shell in which the larva pupates into an adult fly. The whole process takes about 45 days.”
Read the whole article here and have a great 4th of July.
