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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."
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.
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.
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?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
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
TFA says that the ants come from Caribean areas, so Mexico would be on the way as well. After reading TFA I'm a little worried for the people in the area, this looks like the start of something major. Typhoon, earthquake, killer ants, what next? Better get Bruce Willis to start astronaut training real soon.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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...
Ants have been the most successful lifeform on the planet for a long time. Take a look at the Wikipedia article.
"they may constitute up to 15 to 25% of the total terrestrial animal biomass"
"56% of the genera represented on the Baltic amber fossils (early Oligocene), and 96% of the genera represented in the Dominican amber fossils (apparently early Miocene) still survive today"
You are only alive because ants don't view you as a threat.
My god, will no one think of the rubber tree plants!?
Hey! We humans can reproduce in many flexible ways. ^.~
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
+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;
I didn't think so, because of the lack of poison.
And that's after actually thinking about Phase IV the other day when I crushed almost a dozen new fire ant queens within the space of about two hours.
Anyhow, the only thing good about these "crazy ants" seems to be that they kill fire ants. That's it. I don't know if the trade-off is worth it. And I live in Texas, about 200-300 miles from Houston, so of course I hate fire ants with a passion.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
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...
Meh, they eat fire ants; so they're not all bad. If you're lucky enough to live far enough north not to know what a fire ant is, well... good.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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
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.