Posted on 11/30/2004 3:53:38 AM PST by ovrtaxt
TAMPA - Someday, maybe in your back yard, a fire ant will be toiling, lugging a grain of sand from the mound. Happy as an ant can be.
Then it feels a dart of discomfort, over in a tenth of a second, and knows something is wrong.
Its legs tap the soil. It bends and twists, then it goes on doing what ants do. About three weeks later, its head falls off.
How cool is that?
``Everyone likes that part,'' said George Schneider, who is in charge of raising pinhead- size flies that can behead fire ants.
As biological administrator for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Schneider is surrogate father to thousands of phorid flies reared in a Gainesville lab.
Native to South America - same as the imported red fire ants - phorid flies evolved to use fire ant bodies as nurseries for their young.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is employing the flies to combat fire ants in 12 Southeastern states and Puerto Rico.
Scientists think the flies eventually will become established and expand their territory everywhere fire ants have spread, introducing a natural enemy the ants didn't find when they arrived in Louisiana or Alabama in the 1930s. The ants probably came in soil used as ship ballast.
Released near a fire ant mound, the flies hover, waiting to dive on their prey.
The ant senses a split second of unease when a fly deposits an egg in one of the small tubes the ant uses to breathe.
``They know something happened. They do a little dance,'' Schneider said.
The egg hatches, and the larva migrates to the ant's head. It begins eating everything inside. Once ready, it causes the head to topple off, and the larva spends two weeks in the hollow head becoming an adult. Then it flies out of the ant's mouth.
Next week, the last of about 100,000 fire ants, each the host of a fly's egg, will be released in a Sarasota County park.
The hope is they will live long and produce many fine, fire-ant-killing offspring.
``There's no doubt they'll survive. There's lots of fire ants for them,'' said Fred Santana, integrated pest management control coordinator for Sarasota County in charge of dispersing the doomed ants.
It is the second brood of phorid flies released in Sarasota County. The first, in 2002, has spread about five miles from the initial site, he said.
Off To Georgia
Flies released in the Gainesville area since 1998 have expanded into Georgia, said Phil Koehler, a University of Florida entomology professor.
``It takes a couple years for the population to become established,'' he said.
The flies are highly particular about what feeds their youngsters, with different species focusing on different size fire ants.
As much as people might like the idea of fire ant heads rolling off, the flies won't wipe out the pests. Fire ants are here to stay, Schneider said.
The flies help control the ants by knocking back the population and reducing the number of new colonies.
They also reduce the number of mounds that re-infest areas treated with insecticide.
``If you have 10 acres with one or two mounds, you probably wouldn't care, but there can be hundreds on those 10 acres. Then it becomes a problem,'' Schneider said.
Although each female fly can lay 150 to 200 eggs, that won't put much of a dent in a mound with 250,000 ants. The fly's main benefit is scaring fire ants. ``They're deathly afraid of them,'' Santana said.
When the flies hover over a mound, the ants prefer to cower inside and don't venture as far to forage, meaning the mound is weakened and starved. Native ants have a better chance of competing, and the mounds don't multiply.
``The flies keep them in the mound. The colony won't grow. Everything slows down,'' Schneider said.
Anyone who has stepped in a mound knows how fire ants got that name.
They bite you to hold on while punching a stinger on their tails into your skin.
They wait, crawling up your leg without attacking until one gives off a signal, and they all sting at once.
Ants With An Attitude
With larger colonies, a more aggressive attitude and no natural enemies, they displace native ant species. They are voracious feeders, attacking anything they find, including birds that nest on the ground, young snakes and turtles that hatch in underground nests. They even kill young citrus trees by stripping bark from the trunk.
``They're a big problem for livestock,'' Schneider said.
Especially vulnerable are newborn goats and sheep that tend to remain in one place, unlike calves and foals that follow the mother. ``They can be literally killed,'' Schneider said.
Reporter Neil Johnson can be reached at (352) 544-5214.
The problems associated with invasive species are extremely complex!
What else to the flies eat? What eats them? What kind of music do they like? Do we like their music?
You might be interested in the George R.R. Martin novel called "Tuf Voyaging". It's about a man who travels the galaxy in a ship designed for creating new species. He ostesibly sells people just what they want through gene splicing, but he always balances the effect with some little surprise just before he leaves.
A very good read and a cautionary tale on messing with Mother Nature.
Actually one of my kids' favourite things to do when little, was to poke the odd mound just to see the critters boil out of it. I would allow this under my watchful eye, letting them have their fun before I bestowed the crystals.
I must admit the rather loving description of what happens to the ant in the period before the head falls off, leaves me a little chilled.
And as for movies, when I think of ants, I think of "Empire of the Ants" my all time cheesy bad movie favourite. I can still hear that funny antenae rubbing sound the ants made just before they appeared. OOooooh.
really bad movie. Loved it.
Thank you for your reply.." Amdro works the best for us."
But I want them to die a slow painful death, like the top of their heads bitten off by a fly...it is payback time for the scars on my ankles. LOL
One day I was pulling dang vines out of some hedges when I felt something on my hands. Thinking it was just the thorns from the vines I continued until I saw my arm swarmed with fire ants.
Having had many unpleasant encounter with the little buggers, I jerked out of the bushes and lost every bit of calm, collective cool I ever had. There I am, dancing in circles while flailing my arms around trying to knock them off my arms before they do too much damage.
My neighbors thought that I had either lost my mind or got the whole dose of the Holy Ghost seeing me do that crazy arm waiving dance in the yard like that! But I didn't care.
You would be rid of them had not the environmental wackos banned every type of posion that is effective against them.
Reminds me of the nursery rhyme about getting a cat to get rid of the mouse . . .
In this case, the little flies are probably ok, since the really harmful species is already here. One of the most successful biological solutions to foreign invaders was the Florida sterilization of millions of male flies so the target species could not fertilize.
Nope, not true. Back in Louisiana, in the mid-fifties, a MAJOR fire-ant eradication campaign was undertaken, dropping tons of DDT-impregnated corn-meal over thousands of acres from aircraft. The effort failed to have any significant effect on the fire ant, which continued to spread.
I was wondering about that - I wonder if DDT would be effective against these little monsters....???
Really? How do they know that? Perhaps God designed them that way.
It's all in the assumptions.
Agreed. I've nearly got the local market cornered on Amdro. LOL.
You might wanna also try a new granule Ortho just came out with . . . I don't remember the name but it guarantees to keep you fireant-free for a year. So far so good on my property. I spread it in March or April, 2004 -- haven't seen a fireant since.
10 acres you say? What do you use on the backyard? Sorry, old joke -- wasn't funny the first time I heard it either, decided you needed to share in the pain. LOL.
But, seriously, try the Ortho. The only reason I did was my best buddy is the manager at the local Ace Hardware. The "Money Back Guarantee" was all the bait I needed . . . I enjoy the heck outta dogging him. But, so far anyway, he's getting the last laugh and I'm getting rid of fireants.
I remember when I was working on the brush on our place in Texas when the fire ants first came into our area. All of a sudden I felt an huge number of stings up and down both legs and durn close to my special little buddies. My wife still laughs about me stripping down in less than 20 seconds to get those little buggers off me. She told me the dance I was doing was cute. I HATE THOSE LITTLE BUGGERS!
I like playing 'catch' in the yard with my kids...in flipflops. No, I haven't learned yet, even though I should have by now.
I used to love the Ambro commercials where they promised that the fire ants wouldn't just die, but would have a slow agonizing death.
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