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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."
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.
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."
"...Ant are warm blooded [Citation Needed]..."
No, "acts of God" refers to any loss that a warranty or an insurance company can weasel itself out of covering.