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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."
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.
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Here be Dragons
Cold Blooded animals tend to be attracted to heat. Warm Blooded animals produce their own.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Texas A&M page on the ants:
http://urbanentomology.tamu.edu/ants/exotic_tx.cfm
I put a large drop of this stuff on a piece of cardboard and left it on in a corner of the kitchen counter. Within a day, the ants formed a crowded circle around the drop voraciously drinking it up to the point that their bellies swelled up, with a long line of ants going to wherever under the sink they came from. Over several days they went through a third of a small bottle of the stuff! You could see a few apparently coming back for seconds, weak and shaky. Then they were suddenly gone, totally and completely. This was 2 years ago, and they've never come back.
The Terro bottle says it's for "sweet-eating ants" - I thought all ants loved sweets, so I don't know what that means.
+5 Informative on this post... Come on it is just a minor correction, coming from a slip in words. Oh lets highly moderate simple corrections at the expense of actually good topic. Man you guys are so anial to think my above post is worth that much.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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...
Some ants like to eat grease and will ignore sweets. For these ants, I mix the Terro liquid with peanut butter or butter (they love butter). The borax works like tiny pieces of glass that tear the ant bodies apart from the inside. Eventually the queen is fed the borax and the colony dies.
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.