A Floating Mass of Fire Ants in Texas

The programming of nature has always fascinated me... Animals and insects always seem to have some mysterious ways of handling environmental calamities and surviving.<p>I recall an incident a few years ago here where I live in Australia. We live close to a series of cliffs overlooking a beach, and I walk along those cliffs every morning. There was one day when I noticed strange lumps on the grass and walking track. Upon closer observation, I saw that these were hundreds, nay, <i>thousands</i> of hermit crabs, and they were crawling across the ground and heading for every tree and bush in the vicinity, then <i>climbing</i> up them as high as they could.<p>I had NEVER seen hermit crabs do this before.<p>Then, two days later, we had a huge storm hit, and combined with unusually high tides, it ended up with most of the cliff top areas being flooded or overrun with water.<p>How on earth did all these hermit crabs <i>know</i> that this was about to happen 48 hours in advance of the event?? How did they know that they had to climb the cliffs and seek out higher ground within the trees and bushes there?<p>There must be an amazing environmental consciousness just thrumming along outside of &#x27;civilised&#x27; human perception that I wish we could tap back into...

Of interest in the article is this:<p>&gt; flooded fire ants deliver higher doses of venom because they have 165 percent as much venom inside them as normal fire ants<p>Growing up in rural Texas I can assure you that fire ants were never to be messed with (unless you had fire&#x2F;gasoline).<p>I got stung once 3 or 4 times on my ankle, which was swollen for about 3 days. The bites were hug. The oozed a milky liquid. We doused them in calamine lotion, but it still didn&#x27;t stop something like arthritis from hurting.<p>Having been stung by wasps and bees, I find those preferable to fire ant stings. I couldn&#x27;t imagine getting stung by something over 50% worse.

Texans are often regarded as having an affinity for gun ownership. I think that&#x27;s silly. They clearly should all be packing flame-throwers.

&gt; There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks<p>So what we need is a bio-engineered species of fire ant that requires some harmless environmental additive to survive. Then we breed them, release them over a tick-infested area, and let them breed long enough to kill off the ticks. Then quit spraying or watever the additive they need and let them die off.<p>What Could Go Wrong.<p>But seriously, screw ticks <i>and</i> fire ants.

I hope someone from <i>The Atlantic</i> sees this: I will whitelist you for ads but not for trackers. Ads are ok, trackers are the tools of Satan.

I stepped about knee deep into a fire ant mound when I was 8 in Florida. I thought I was going to die. I&#x27;ve never seen something swarm quite that fast.

&gt; There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. The area where the fire ants landed may be crawling with stinging ants for a while. “But it’ll have absolutely no ticks. So it’ll be lovely from that perspective,” says Wild.<p>Sounds like on balance they might do more good than harm, then? Fire ant stings are painful, but they&#x27;re nothing compared to Lyme disease.

Somehow I keep expecting Texans to roast the ants from their boats with flamethrowers pieced together from converted gas grills as they go about rescuing the stranded.<p><i>edit: lol, apparently I&#x27;m not the only one.</i>

I live just north of Houston and while checking out the flood waters, I saw just such masses, several of them in fact. If you do bump into them, or they bump into you, they will swarm you.

A little bit of watered down dawn in a hand sprayer would fix that...<p>Coincidentally this reminds me of a really strange MacGyver episode from the 80s

Could humans realistically do something similar by grabbing on to one another with arms extended out (imagine three people, A onto B and C, B onto A and C, and so forth). People have been able to do some crazy things, like these ants, under the right circumstances.<p>It&#x27;s always so sad to see people drown. It would be neat if we could create an emergency human raft in such desperate times in a pinch.

I find it interesting that during this period this invasive species is vulnerable to attack. It also makes me wonder about all of the other nominally &#x27;land&#x27; based insects. Beetles? Other species of ants? spiders? What is the insect ecosystem impact of a huge die off like this? Does it make native species more vulnerable? give them breathing room (presumably they would have evolutionary advantages to surviving these events if they evolved in the area).

I am back to ... one million ants

Wasn&#x27;t there some sort of classical math problem that this illustrates somehow? surface tension, math theory, etc? (my memory for this sort of thing isn&#x27;t great)

Perhaps I missed it, but are all the ants alive in this raft? Seems tricky to manage without some of them being submerged underwater for an extended period of time..

Anyone else notice how circular that mass was? Nature loves economy.

So what happens to the ants on the bottom of the pile?

it would be terrifying wading though the water and seeing a huge mound of fire ants ants floating nearby

Unreal

That would suck for you, but would be good from a ecological perspective - eating red meat isn&#x27;t our most sustainable practice.

colony remain 1 million ants!

I&#x27;m sorry but how is this got to be on the first page of HN? I seen similar article on.. DailyMail. How is this related to hacking and technology? Just curious...