Crazy Raspberry ants eat electronics?

[••SpraynPray••]

No, it is not a made for TV movie starring Suzanne Sommers, but it sure sounds like the plot for one. A tiny terror, dubbed the Crazy Raspberry Ant has been mounting a growing assault on the city of Houston, Texas, and despite the best efforts of pest control experts, the ants are winning. Called Crazy because they tend to meander aimlessly, rather than holding to tight military lines like most ants, and Raspberry after the name of an exterminator that encountered them early on, these little six-legged demons have been wreaking havoc on the city since 2002.

Computers, fire alarms, sewage pumps, and a gas meter have all fallen victim to the Crazy Raspberry Ants. For reasons that scientists can't explain, these little gadget-gobblers are attracted to electronic equipment and in the high tech city of Houston that can only spell trouble.

Measures taken to control the population of the Crazy Raspberry Ants have been unsuccessful to date. The ants seem to have some sort of natural resistance to common pesticides and ant-killers. They also have established a system of redundancy within their colonies. Each Crazy Raspberry Ant nest has multiple queens, so that if one queen is killed (a common strategy in destroying ant nests) there are several others that will see the colony survive and thrive. They also seem to possess a natural suspicion, and avoid taking poison-baited food back to their nests. The Crazy Raspberry Ants also have other unique defense capabilities. When some of their number are killed by a pesticide the ants will pile the bodies of their dead over the pesticide, making a bridge of dead flesh to safely cross these deadly areas.

This combination of defense tactics, and the hot, humid Houston weather that the ants seem to thrive in, has allowed the population of the Crazy Raspberry Ants to swell since 2002, and now pest control experts despair of ever getting rid of the little beasties.

[Plinker]

Crazy Raspberry ants eat electronics?

Boy, it's a s-l-o-w night tonight here on PFOA. =) LOL

Plinker

[Damage control]

DC

[pex]

"Crazy Raspberry Ants"?

The media needs to get the nomenclature down and stop trying to appeal to the more ignorant.

Make a mention that they are, in reality, termites (don't even need to go down to genus or anything, christ). What we have here is a case of evolution, where termites have gone from eating wood to electronics, given the ubiquity of electronics as human technological developments expand!