Tiny ‘crazy rasberry ants’ are staggering over Texas, eating endangered chickens, filling up swimming pools, trashing electrical equipment and generally behaving like spring break students after a few too many.
The ants don’t have a proper name yet, due to “confusion regarding the taxonomy of the genus” according to Texas A&M University’s Urban Entomology website. This has left them with the name Paratrechina sp. nr. Pubens [species near: ie a paratrechina ant something like the pubens type].
In the meantime they’re being called ‘crazy’ because they don’t walk straight and ‘rasberry’ after one of their first opponents, a pest controller called Tom Rasberry.
“They’re just running wild,” says Patsy Morphew of Pearland (Houston Chronicle). “… They crawl through the eaves of the house and go into the bathroom. You know what it’s like to sit down on the commode with crazy ants running everywhere?”
Jason Meyers, of Texas A&M University, is attempting to classify the ants. No one knows where they came from but their domain is growing.
Meyers told the Chronicle they can damage plants due to their symbiotic relationship sap-sucking aphids and for some reason they love to nest in electrical equipment. “We’ve already seen them short out pipeline valves two years in a row in Pasadena,” he says.
They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven’t caused any major problems there yet.
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the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.
No one seems to have got a quote from E.O. Wilson yet…