Them crazy ants!

There’s a new ant threat here in Texas and several other southern states. Good news, they’re not giant atomic ants! But these normal sized ants are said to make fire ants look polite, they’re affectionately nicknamed crazy ants:

UT Texas — LeBrun said crazy ants are much harder to control than fire ants. They don’t consume most of the poison baits that kill fire ant mounds, and they don’t have the same kinds of colony boundaries that fire ants do. That means that even if they’re killed in a certain area, the supercolony survives and can swarm back over the area.

LeBrun said that in northern Argentina and southern Brazil, where the ants are native, populations are likely held in check by other ant species and a variety of natural enemies. In the U.S. there is no such natural control.

Here the crazy ants can attain densities up to 100 times as great as all other ants in the area combined. In the process, they monopolize food sources and starve out other species. LeBrun said the crazy ants, which are omnivorous, may also directly attack and kill other ant and arthropod species.

Well, we’ve survived killer bees, barely, and fire ants. If these guys don’t even sting the bottom line is I’m not that worried about them crazy ants(!), yet.


  1. says

    They’ve been known to short out electrical wiring and they invade areas of the home, and as they run around frantically, they are hard to catch or kill, so these are some things to watch out for as well.

  2. tyros says

    Nope, nope. Donʼt want these in my house. The fire ants are enough! I can barely go more than a few steps in a park or in my yard without running into those things. >:(( Scooping up piles of crazy ants… *shudders*

  3. joseph says

    I read an article last year that stated fire ants don’t generally move into houses and live there. Crazy ants on the other hand like to move into peoples houses.

  4. birgerjohansson says

    If we could get those ants to function as modular units, adding up to bigger monstrous entities…

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