While it’s some way from B-movie celluloid extras fleeing for their lives to the sound of a shrieking 1950’s soundtrack, the poor folk in Texas are certainly concerned about an imported infestation of ravenous ants with a taste for anything electronic.
Arrgh! Run AWAY! Crazy Rasberry Ants are hungry for electronic devices. Image: TheBridge/Flickr.
Believed to have found their way onto American soil from a Caribbean cargo ship in 2002, the tiny reddish brown ants have since spread into the billions and populate a radius of around 50 miles from their point of entry. Officials are indicating that the ever-hungry ants are now in danger of reaching Houston, which is the fourth largest city in the United States.
Since their arrival, the scurrying insects have been labelled as “crazy rasberry ants” due to their fast and uncharacteristically haphazard style of movement, and also after the veteran pest exterminator (Tom Rasberry) who first uncovered the potential infestation problem the stowaway ants brought with them. Their accurate name is ‘paratrenicha species near pubens’.
In terms of the ants’ preferred food stuff, it’s not meaty humans but their electronic devices that the tiny swarming beasties hanker after. Indeed, anything from computer systems to telephone exchanges, it’s all on the menu for the crazy rasberry ants.
Specifically, after already chewing their way through multiple vital flow-management computers at a chemical plant and wreaking short-circuit havoc with a number of private and business computer systems, the electronic appetite of the crazy rasberry ants has led to a growing sense of concern.
“If you open a computer, you would find a cluster of ants on the motherboard and all over,” outlined Mr. Rasberry in a Computerworld report. “You’d get 3,000 or 4,000 ants inside and they create arcs. They’ll wipe out any computer.”
Now, with the ants shifting steadily towards Houston, state officials have already been panicked enough to call in Tom Rasberry’s extermination skills with regard to protecting the safety of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, which contains hugely sensitive technological equipment that could be devastated by the relentless spread.
And relentless seems to be the watchword of note in this particular story, not least because Roger Gold, a professor of entomology at Texas A&M University in College Station, believes it would be “near impossible to eradicate the ants” due to them being dispersed over such a wide geographical area.
Effective extermination is made all the more difficult as the raspberry ants do not shuffle of the insect coil when doused in over-the-counter pest poisons, and the swift multiplication of each colony is bolstered considerably by the positioning of several queens.
In addressing its expanding ant problem, the Texas Department of Agriculture has said it is currently working alongside researchers from A&M University and the Environmental Protection Agency in order to uncover a definitive way to stamp out the spread.
anonMay 16th, 2008 - 16:42:36
No wonder - Texas is full of vermin, bugs of all kinds. Typical of that state to be overrun with something like this.
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