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.
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.
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
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."
"...Ant are warm blooded [Citation Needed]..."
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
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
Serious Problem: Posting on /. Before Coffee
News at 11
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
don't they know about not messing with Texas
Its not the years, its the mileage
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!
Right, because Rachel Carson must be a witch from hell itself for wanting to reduce pesticides that cause birth defects and death?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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...
A moat filled with gasoline.
My god, will no one think of the rubber tree plants!?
Damn you Wesley Crusher and your wild nanites!
+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.
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;
Oh, ok. So we just need to make cold computers. How hard could that be?
"They are the size of fleas but they eat ladybugs? How does that work, exactly?"
The key word here is "they". It's plural. I eat cows...but not by myself.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
Tell that to the millions saved every year from malaria by DDT.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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...
Easy. It is all part of Quantum computing. With Quantum computing they work best when turned off so... All we need to do is have a bunch of Quantum computer processing a large amounts of data without returning any input. thus they will all run cool
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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).
Uh, excuse me, I think you mean "anal". :)
http://wsulug.org
Nerd ants!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Let's quote Carson herself: "No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored.... Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ... Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible."
Doesn't sound like she wanted to eliminate DDT, does it? Rather, she wanted its use scaled back from what she saw as excessive.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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.
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.
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).