Slashdot Mirror
Swarming Ants Destroy Electronics in Texas
AntOverlords writes "Voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area,
shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers. 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."
Interestingly, the first ever computer bug was also of the 'physical' variety - See here
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
I for one welcome our swarming ant overlords - just so long as they stay in YOUR neighborhood.
The ants are finally tired of building my Java code for me I see.
Umm? Is this news? My friends living on an island near Cancun, Mexico have this problem all the time... for years...
Biological cyber warefare! Did anyone check their heads for lasers?
They're just destroying the electronics that American ants won't.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
.... just keep 'em out of my beer.
chown -R us
... I'm impressed, by how fast we could be the losing species on this planet.
;)
Imagine a plague that we can't control, originating from such an incident. Small swarming animals are very much in advantage here because there is no big target that we could hit, and because they can reproduce in a more flexible way.
Maybe we should think a bit more about our existence than being arrogant and making "I, for one..." jokes.
Fire ants, Killer bees, Chestnut blight, Dutch Elm Disease, Sudden Oak Death (all invasive and here because of lax monitoring).
No natural predators I bet, and not big news until they spread out across the U.S and degrade the living conditions in your area.
The US should really have much more stringing inspections of container shipping. We can send a man to the moon but not inspect cargo. right?
We rely on cheap goods as imports but fail to take into account the true cost of invasive species control. It is huge.
i used to work for a satellite TV company and insect infestation is was specifically mentioned under the "acts of God" portion of the warranty (more specifically as not covered under said warranty).
in training there were a few tales floating around of people calling in with their receiver boxes killed by ants.
It's a serious problem... Ant are warm blooded, and are going to like heat... Electronics produce heat (as do Air Conditioning units)
Given the number of Data Centers we have, I'm surprised that we haven't seen more problems like this where bugs (the little six-legged variety) cause more problems.
I do foresee a new booming speciality - Electronics-safe pest control (think Halon vs. Water for fire suppression, except for insects)
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Is it just me, or does that sound like some type of STD?
For your entertainment
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
a hardware bug
Just wait for the frenzy of right wing nuts screaming about how immigrants are destroying the country... blah blah blah!
I live in the tropics, and for some bizarre reason, this colony of red ants that have taken residence at our place have started making beelines for my PCs
At one point I was wondering why some keys in my keyboard stopped responding when I found the damn ants had eaten the rubber linings under the keys!
I've now had to resort to drawing circles of protection around my electronics with insecticide chalk to keep the damn critters out...
http://www.object404.com
How long 'til the Sci Fi Channel makes a movie about this?
My company often has ant trouble with electronic equipment installed in the far North of Queensland, in Australia.
Unless boxes are very tightly sealed, they'll get into the electronics and destroy them - usually by creating shorts or damaging PCB tracks.
We've had a few boards sent back that reeked so strongly of ants that you could smell it through the packaging. Generally, they're too damaged to be worth repairing.
Anecdotally, I've heard of a number of other companies having similar problems with installations in tropical areas. I'm not sure if it's a problem specific to electronics, or if it's just a case of the ants getting into everything, and the electronics being particularly vulnerable.
|>
Here be Dragons
But do they eat paper ballots as well as Diebold voting machines?
The chances of anything coming from earth..
:(
And our flying monsters will be destroyed by something as small as an ant eating it's way through yet an other o-ring
Privacy is terrorism.
Go and look at a container ship, then tell me how you propose to inspect it. Have you any idea how many inspectors would be needed, or how long it would take?
Actually, ants are the least of your worries. It's been pointed out by security specialists that container ships are an ideal way for terrorists to bring in the parts of nuclear weapons. While they're pretending to make things safe at airports, there's a 20-lane superhighway wide open into almost all developed countries, consisting of uninspectable shipping containers and artic trailers. Bomb parts can have their radiation reduced to background levels easily enough, put them in a container full of auto parts and nothing will detect them.
It's one world, for good or bad, and we have to live with it. Blaming foreigners is unlikely to be productive. These things are a cost that we bear because we no longer live in isolated tribal groups or city states, with an average GNP per head of about 600 1980 dollars, or whatever the last estimate was.
Realistically, even a 15kt bomb being exploded by terrorists in the middle of NY or Boston would do less harm to civilisation than natural causes do from time to time, and these ants are equally unlikely to do severe long term damage.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Hail ants!
This news is just asking for "obligatory" memes
Texas A&M page on the ants:
http://urbanentomology.tamu.edu/ants/exotic_tx.cfm
Toss a handful into the Directed Sound Weapons being sent to China. A dose of the little buggers in routers headed to the Friendly Peoples Republic of Helpful Direct Email Marketers could help cut down on the size of my college-educated penis with it's own collection of faux watches.
What did they eat before they got Dell-burgers?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
"And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide"
My brother just said:
"They must not be ants!" Mini Space Ant Overlords anyone?
Also, didn't we just have an article about a self-destruct for the space shuttle? Hopefully, it is not tied to the electronics in the Space Center in Houston.
This 1970s sci-fi movie immediately came to my mind: Phase IV. In this movie, some scientist study ants which collaborate to spread in a desert-like area and also start to sabotage the science-lab short-cirtuiting computers and AC.
:-)
scary thing that those creatures really exist
Thanks Ms Carson
don't they know about not messing with Texas
Its not the years, its the mileage
life imitating art...
if you can call it art
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords!
Help! I've fallen in a karma hole and I can't get up!
In 2002 or 2003 while living in Pasadena, my roommate and I were cleaning, and tried to move our N64 from the floor to a shelf. Under it, we found a brown mass which turned out to me a massive clump of these ants. We hosed them in insecticide, cleaned up the mess, and figured it was just a freak occurrence. A few days later I found a similar clump completely engulfing the powerhead on a small tank of cichlids. Being that cichlids will eat anything, I used a water bottle and hosed them all into the tank to be devoured. I had to replace the powerhead afterwards, and the N64 never worked right again.
The complex wrote it off as a side-effect of the recent heavy rain, and did nothing.
Future events such as these may affect you in the future!
umm... what does this have to do with ants?
Are you saying the elected President Gore is really an ant?
I always saw him more as a crab person...
I encountered HVAC control systems in the midwest US 10-20 years ago which failed because the enclosure was packed w/ dead ants. Never understood why, but fortunately just cleaning them out fixed the problem.
This is bad. I mean, sure it's only Texas now, but if they spread they could threaten a state that doesn't deserve swarms of attacking insects.
taken from http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F13.html
Kent Brockman: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Technology Consulting & Free Downloads
In southern india someone stored all his earnings in the form of paper for his later retirement into a bank vault.
After some years time he looked into his box to see only some pieces left and some bugs which ate his money. The bank vault was not completly tight and the warm humid weather did it's part in this sad drama, too.
The bank could not be held liable, because it warned its customers of the bug problem long ago. And even when they were liable, they only would have to pay his money for the rent of his box, which is not much rupies instead of his financial damage.
Morale of the story: Don't think something lasts forever. Your DVD's are due in about 15 years time. HD and Blueray much shorter, so don't store your money on it.
I think that "acts of God" applies specifically to locusts...
Sounds like a deja vu!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
A moat filled with gasoline.
My god, will no one think of the rubber tree plants!?
I live in new england, Massachusetts, the next town over from Boston. It gets below zero (F) in the winter, and gets above 100 (F) in the summer. It rains a lot. It has heat waves.
For all those people who live in places where the climates are warm all year round, this is what you get. In the north east, creatures that live here deserve to live here. Most foreign insects and alien species either die in the cold of the winter or in the heat of the summer. Drown in the spring rain or die from the dryness of summer.
Maybe we need to ensure that ships doc at ports with hostile environments to the last port of call. Ships coming from the Caribbean must doc in Maine. Ships coming from Norway must doc in Texas. This will ensure that the environment prevents them taking hold.
Damn you Wesley Crusher and your wild nanites!
Easy. Just blame China.
THEM!
They are the size of fleas but they eat ladybugs? How does that work, exactly? A ladybug is a couple of orders of magnitude more massive than a flea.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why do I think DARPA is on the phone with Uncle Milton's* right now?
(or maybe they made the call several years ago and are having some success).
*the "Ant Farm" people who supply ants by mail order - of course, then again, DARPA probably has access to Ant eugenics programs and szuper ants, so maybe they don't need to call the ant farmers.
"mighty man" is about to be taken down by insects, again.
I wonder if these were engineered as a directed attack against our country or just evolved to fit into our technological age..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For some reason, certain species of ants consider wiring insulation delicious, which can lead to some interesting situations.
Once when I was down in Panama, a swarm of ants got into a street-side power junction box that supplied industrial-class juice to three huge aircraft hangars. The cute little buggers immediate set themselves to devouring all the insulation off of the main power feeds, and when those arm-thick bundles of now-bare copper came into contact. . . .
BOOM!
The nearest hangar was five stories tall. The shredded remains of that junction box landed on the roof. And I swear it rained ants for the next half hour....
:\
Regards;
THEY DIG, WE SLEEP
When I read the headline, I thought they were talking about fire ants--which would be very old news. Fire ants invaded the country decades ago. We've known for years that fire ants have an affinity for electrical equipment. But these little buggers eat fire ants, so I say bring 'em on. I don't see how anything that eats fire ants can be considered to be a pest.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Cowboy Neal could hunt them down and suck them up with a garden hose.
The ants in my ant farm do not cross the barrier of vaseline I smear round the top.
Fill your PCs and servers with vaseline. Or don't. Or do, but don't complain to me afterwards.
Joking aside, these ant farms look great on a desk. They don't require much feeding and they do all their own cleaning; they way they remove their dead to a specific area is a joy to watch. Catching them from the garden is simply a case of leaving a blob of jam in a container.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I was working in The Gambia none too long ago. We'd have ant problems there too - they'd eat UPSs, network cables, etc. Real pain. The best way to deal with them when we could was to put the swarmed device out in the sun. For whatever reason they didn't like that. I don't know if this is the same variety of ant, but it might work...
As somebody who moved to NYC a year ago, I have to say that doing that might be a net gain to society. ;)
come to a country with so low standards (in nearly all respects that matter: e.g. social security, currency, living standards, ...) :-)
I fail to see how something that is actually occurring is "less" than something that is overblown, only theorized, and far less damaging in the long run.
Can't find the reference, but there's an old quote in software that goes something like: "If buildings were built like software, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization". Now s/woodpecker/ants/ s/software/hardware/
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
In place of a snarky comment, I actually have a question. How on earth did this come about, anyway?
It's not like you could just accidentally pack 3,000,000 ants into a crate without noticing, so somehow, they must have managed to pick up a queen that survived the whole trip. Except queens generally hang out deep in nests laying eggs and stuff and not crawling into random crates. I suppose it's possible they picked up one of the few fertile females intended to become queens, and also a bunch of male ants who then performed a mating flight after arrival, but it seems unlikely.
Whatever the cause, sounds like something that could seriously mess with the ecosystem's chi.
"Time for the required DOT inspection, Ahmad!"
"The plutonium spheres are all intact and accounted for, O'Reilly."
(Trying to be fair and multicultural here)
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
This has been known for many years. Here are more taken from my personal ant Web site:
/.).
Ants in yer... Pants? NOT! (Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants Invade Apple iBook.
Ants In
My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! account is required).
Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox. Thanks nTrFace.
Argentine ants invade a network hub.
Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive: Ontrack
and Computerworld
(seen on
A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his DSL connection and phone system.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
...do they eat Linux?
Glass Texas before the ants can spread.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Unfortunately, the article misspells the scientific name. It should be "Paratrechina", not "paratrenicha".
If it wasn't for things like this, we would never upgrade our infrastructure...
Lurchicus - For Sig, see other side.
Please mod insightful.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
ants destroy Texas instruments ?
I didn't know TI was still running.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
I've lived in Houston since 1967, and we've had these ants for at least the last 30 years. We call'em "sugar ants" cuz they look like they're on a crazy sugar rush. Ants are always getting into anything that stays warm and dry at night - the humidity during summer is rarely less than 85%, and dew occurs almost every night. The ants and other bugs just crawl in where they won't get unexpectedly wet, including between the extra-warm contactors on ac compressors. I worked as an AC repairman in 1978ish, and was often cleaning ants out of contactors. I have no idea why this is suddenly news.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Can we use them to recycle our old TVs (after the HDTV upgrade) and electronics? Can we also use them for biofuel after they finish eating?
Nerd ants!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I say we fill a container ship with queens and send them over seas to Asia. May they feel the wrath of the Carribean!! That way it will be their problem too. And they would figure out a way to stop these crazy ants.
I think we should burn Texas from the outside in, to prevent these god-killing beasties from spreading out, along with a bunch of other tech-fearing subhumans.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
These are different ants.
http://bexar-tx.tamu.edu/IPM/Household/F1/homeantbait.htm
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The author of this article misspelled the name of the ant. I tried Googling "paratrenicha species near pubens" and came up only with results pointing back to this one article.
Correctly spelled, the ant's name is "Paratrechina sp. nr. pubens." It has not yet been identified to the species level, hence the "species near" bit.
Also, what's with this sentence?
No insect bites with a stinger. It's two different ends, folks! I frequently hear someone yelp, "That bee just bit me!" No, she stung you. Honeybees don't even have chewing mouthparts capable of biting--they just suck nectar with a siphon-like structure.
Fun Fact: Only female insects sting, since a stinger is actually a modified ovipositor. Thankfully, mammals like our ladies haven't yet evolved venomous uses for their reproductive parts.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to trade and buy stuff with real hard currency. If you aren't into the scene it might look impossible, but I assure you it isn't. Most people have been deluded by the central banker thieves into using their toilet paper, or even worse, their poof created electron money, but a small contingent of humans in the west and a larger one in the east use precious metals coinage and bullion bars for transfers, large and small. Snooze ya lose. Trust those jerks with all your money, it can evaporate or be devalued overnight, keep a lot of your wealth under your own protection in hard currency-it lasts. And ants can't eat gold or silver or platinum. Real true commodities are always worth more than phony IOU debt paper. This is why you see those thieves having to get bailed out by the biggest thief, the Fed, lately, because they stuck each other with worthless crap. Conmen screwing over other conmen. The more you avoid dealing with those jerks and their so called money, the better off you really are, in real life, now and today, not future promises of money.
Yes, it isn't perfect for very small sales, but once you get up just a little bit, and do some discrete shopping, you'll find a lot of people will take coinage and give you a pretty good deal over the equivalent-that day-pile of toilet paper with dead presidents/kings/dictators pictures on them. Say you are building a system and go to your nearest asian run whitebox shop for the good deals. Show him the shiny, you'll get really great prices. You can get vehicles, electronics, hell even real estate with the real money over the boom and bust scam conman paper/electronic money crap. Durable metals coinage was worth it as money thousands of years ago and it still is. FRNs are worth maybe 2% of what they were worth when originally issued way back when, whereas the round and shiny is worth a lot more. Best way to beat inflation, best no brainer way to store cash. You'll still need some of their craptastic money for small scale stuff purchases, but you can still work with it on the medium and large and very large (business to business scale) stuff if you try.
As to McDonalds, funny story, but yes, when they were still new on the scene you could pay in circulation silver coinage for some burgers, I did it a lot back then when it was still common, when we had silver dimes, quarters, halfs and dollars. A silver buck back then got you a sack of burgers and stuff, today, the same silver dollar is worth about three sacks of assorted mc donalds stuff. Their crap paper went down in worth, the hard money went up a lot. Think about it.
I can't believe someone put "Them" in the tagline. The more appropriate would have been "Phase IV"
But the pics shown for paratrechina are the ant I was talking about. around here, we call'em 'sugar ants', not cuz they eat sugar or cuz that's the "official" name, but cuzza they way they run around like crazy. It's a name coincidence, cuz most people aren't bugologists, so they just come up with "unapproved names". After awhile, that's what everyone in the area calls'em. What they are now calling the "crazy ant", including the pics and descriptions on the site you linked, are (uh, WERE is more likely now) called 'sugar ants'. Sorry for the confusion. The paratrechina as shown and described in the news has been around Houston for many many years longer than the news reports claim.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Obey, or be swarmed!
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
"They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter" Sounds like TXU or Atmos energy should have an incentive to pay a little to "research" a viable erradication method...
I think Edwin Newman put it best:
"Gender is a grammatical term - it is not a substitute for sex. ...But then, what is?"
http://antfarm.yuku.com/topic/7013/master/1/
"Worker ants are female because they are genetically female (with different details, but along the lines of human with two X-chromosomes per cell being female, vs those with an X and a Y being male). Worker ants also have at least vestigial ovaries and stings, which are female reproductive and modified egg-laying organs, respectively.
Also, not all worker ants are non-reproductive. Many can lay eggs that give rise to males, most often when they are away from the influence of the queen. In some ant species, the workers and queens are not, or barely, morphologically distinguishable. Finally, in a small number of ant species that do have distinct queen and worker body types, there is evidence that workers can lay eggs that give rise to other workers..."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I call on the ancient ones, arise and come forth, I call on you sshd and you httpd, arise, arise and do my bidding!
[Swarming ants] have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet."
"That's one small step...ah!...step step step step, there's ants in my boots, Houston, step step STOMP!"
Table-ized A.I.
1. Set the bug zapper on the ground.
2. Set up chairs.
3. Set up cooler and fill with cheap beer.
4. Sell beer to spectators.
5. Profit!
[End Of Line]
... something messed with Texas; Texans confused.
Chuck Norris has been put on stand by.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ah, that explains it then.
Since this is slashdot I feel I should call you a name or something~
Thanks for the info.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you opened up your keyboard you would probably find all manner of junk under the keys, including:
- hair
- crumbs and other small food particles
- dust
- bits of dried skin
- possible small dried blobs of drink
A couple of the above are going to be quite attractive to ants...
Try turning your keyboard upside down and bang on the back really hard a couple of times to see what falls out. You might be surprised.
is for them to invade a few of the loud car stereo amplifiers some of the obnoxious twits like to play for everyone to hear. Then, they'd be doing us all a public service...
Paul Stamets has spoken recently about a new technique for killing ants that involves introducing a fungus in to the colony that the ants will take back to the queen as food - when the ants eat it, the fungus grows inside them and kills them. Its all natural and pesticide free. the fungus is a natural one and to my knowlege is not invasive or problematic in any other way. He talks about it in his new book "Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms can save the world" http://www.fungi.com/books/stamets.html Fascinating stuff Ants are also really interesting, they have a short life cycle, so their evolution happens about 20-30 times faster than human evolution. All your base r belong to ants
Wouldn't it be on the insurance company to prove that the incident was indeed caused by God :)?