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Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants
eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and — oddly enough — electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."
I for one welcome our new Zombie Fire Ant overlords.
You call this a zombie apocalypse? This ain't nothing compared to the zombie attack of 57.
My first thought was "Why does Texas need a zombie to terminate the employment of ants, and how did they get a job in the first place?"
Then I realized, this is Texas, afterall.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Introducing foreign species, even to battle other foreign species /NEVER WORKS/.
Way to fuck over the native ants, Texas. Not to mention any other unpredictable side-effects, which, when talking about introduced species, are /ALWAYS BAD/.
Reminds me of cane toads.
This is what those environmentalists should be doing. Using nature against nature in ways that can help man.
---Hank Hill of Arlen, TX
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
More
Like this http://www.austmus.gov.au/factsheets/canetoad.htm
Cane toads !!!!
This little bastards will eat anything they can physically get in their mouths!
A complete disaster.
Zombies are never the answer. Oh wait. Zombie ant overlords? That's totally different.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Richard Dawkins talks about ants doing this kind of stuff in his book: The Selfish Gene.
It's an awesome book to read if you want to learn more about the world you're living in and also reasoning behind a lot of human behaviour.
Time zone converter
I'm sure there will be no unforeseen changes to the local ecosystems. Why, what could possibly go wrong?
"These are very slow acting," Plowes said. "It's more like a cumulative impact measured across a time frame of years. It's not an immediate silver bullet impact."
Well of course there's no silver bullet impact for zombie fire ants, but if we need to get rid of some werewolf fire ants, the silver bullets might do the trick!
Just askin'.
Coming this summer to a theatre near you:
Texas Zombie Ant Chainsaw Massacre!
How's that for a mashup?
I for one don't welcome your tired unfunny cliche use.
When are the Russians going to get around to linking all these zombies into a botnet? Or would that be a bugnet?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'll go wild on your wife...
Whatever company that makes RAID (bug spray, not disk stuff)...
BUY!
The product will be needed soon, and in great quantities.
Porky Pig tried this once in an old Bug Bunny cartoon.
He had a mouse problem, so he bought a cat.
When Porky Pig went to bed, the cat invited all of his friends over and they got wasted played the piano loudly and sang drinking songs. One of the cats had a lampshade on his head and everything.
When Porky Pig got fed up with this, he bought a dog. How he found a place in the 50's or 60's that sold dogs in the middle of the night is anyone's guess. He let the dog loose in the house and waited.
The cats got the dog drunk and he was singing with them in about 30 seconds.
So obviously these flies are eventually going to get drunk and sing, which is pretty cool, making this plan sweet.
After a few horrendous early bad attempts (Cane Toads for example) Australia's CSIRO (the government's research arm) has gotten very very good at importing biological controls to deal with other invasive species. They now have methodologies in place that let them do so on a regular basis.
Examples include the moth that was used to eradicate Prickly Pear, the introducing of African dung beetles to curb an explosion in flies due to agriculture, and the rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus have all been very successful.
And they've introduced no less than 5 different species (3 weevils, 2 flies and a moth) to successfully control Onopordum Thistles (although the program is ongoing).
I think the rule of thumb here is that you don't solve your invasive species problems by just wandering over to their source country, picking up the first highly visible superpredator that you find, and bringing it back. (Cane Toads, Mongooses, Wolves, etc)
When I got to New Mexico, I couldn't even look at huevos rancheros. Within a year, they had become a breakfast favorite.
The phorids will have whole generations to refine their taste.
Reminds me of cane toads.
I understand that there was an additional import used to deal with Cane Toads that isn't in the wiki article. As I heard it:
There was a problem with cattle dung. The native dung beetles didn't dispose of it. So each cow flop would lie around for years, killing off a circle of grass several feet across. Cows make a LOT of flops, so this was a serious problem
So they imported dung beetles that WOULD break up and bury cow flops. But the Cane Toad would eat them, so they didn't take hold.
Finally they found a BIG dung beetle that would use cow flops. The cane toads would eat this one, too. But it was a big hardy bug. So it would dig its way out of the toad. Problem (and toad) solved. B-)
Unfortunately there apparently aren't enough cow flops to produce a big enough population of these booby-trap-beetles to wipe out the cane toads. So the toads are still a problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In Texas, fire ants are bountiful. There will be no need to attack other ants...
Of course that's now, it will be interesting to see what happens when the fire ant population starts dwindling. But basically these will probably just keep it in more of a natural check.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We have had a fire ant problem here in Queensland, Australia for a few years now. It has been a big problem and quite a talking point for the Qld government (www.dpi.qld.gov.au/fireants/). But there has never been a suggestion to introduce a natural predator. I'm curious as to why they haven't. Possibly because the last time they tried using a natural predator; the cane toad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad)it backfired badly and we are now over run by the little buggers.
Can I get something like this for my ex-wife?
And what if that fly starts killing off other native species important to the ecosystem? Import more species!
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I dunno why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly -
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a bird;
How absurd, to swallow a bird!
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly -
Perhaps she'll die
There was an old lady who swallowed a cat. ...
Imagine that, she swallowed a cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she'll die
and you know that goes . . .
There are just so many bad science fiction plotlines here...and in all of them, we end up mining underground sugar caves for Nazgulesque maggots astride their fearsome zombie fire ants. In a few, we end up being tortured by the fire ants' Neo, who hunts the Evil Humans who brought the maggots among them...
Advice: on VPS providers
Dude, be careful there. She's probably 4'9", 350 lbs, and has a body even a Mac truck wouldn't want to hit.
We are the disease... we are the cure... we are the disease... we are the cure...
SUCKER!
Seastead this.
There are a lot of cases where this kind of approach went terribly wrong, but, what are the alternatives to solve the fire ant problem, without causing far more problems?
I believe the imported fire ants have one-neuron brains that work as follows: Am I in contact with something? If yes, bite it. In reality the fire ants have displaced native ant species, which are the primary diets of some much more delightful creatures, the horned lizards. Perhaps the only chance the horned lizards have are the phorid flies to keep the fire ants sufficiently controlled that native ants can make a sufficient comeback to save the horny toads.
Life is tough. Life is even tougher when you're stupid.
Quick, tell the aliens from the Hulu ad that ant's brains make better soup!
This is the first year I have not seen any fire ants. It used to be a constant battle, and the bites hurt. A year or two ago the crazy ants showed up (Paratrechina longicornis). They are now everywhere and have evicted the fire ants. They rarely bite, but they are EVERYWHERE (in my yard). They even tried to move into my car. EVERYWHERE.
Just like our current human overlords, then.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
What happens when the flies run out of ant brains to devour? Will they crave human brains?
In Australia we have recently had the fire ant invade our island nation with some very nasty environmental results. After years of study the CSIRO have discovered an inherent weakness with the fire ants colonies. The queen is the only ant able to breed in a colony so if you disable her the colony dies. So what we do here in the land of the sun and over sized rabbits called kangaroos is put the fire ant the queen on the pill, so far it has worked very well but like everything needs to be managed.
More info can be found here
"The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie..." Why did this bit read in prof Farnsworth's voice in my head???
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
flies plant larvae, which eats brain, creates zombie, which wanders around until head falls off. It's like a convoluted JAPH script. Why not just get anteaters? They eat the ants, you're done.
hmm, is this is fork of openldap that I don't know about?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Import every species on Earth and it will fix every problem including those you never knew existed - such as that pest, the human being.
"Old bag" has more than one meaning.
Will the flies outdo chiggers in laying eggs in animals? Does this mean we can wear shorts in the Texas countryside?
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
Misleading title: those are not zombie fire ants.
True zombie fire ants would look for non-zombie fire ants for brains before they die, and turn those into zombies.
And do you know the worst part, Jimmy? They don't kill you right away. No, they paralyze you and then they feast, then they lay eggs inside your head and you're still alive as the little ones crawl out through your nose and mouth, and eventually, your eyes.
Now go to bed, grampa hears something in the walls he's got to deal with.
First off, to the Australian solution, fire ants here have multiple queen colonies, sometimes dozens. Makes treatment a little more complex.
Also, the phorid flies are great, but one thing a doctoral student (my boss) found in his research was that fire ants can detect the fly, hide from it in the day, then overcompensate at night (because the flies rest and won't move at night). So the ants won't forage in the day, but they go on a frenzy at night and forage more than they would have otherwise.
So anyways it is arguable they they only aggravate the problem.
I, for one, fear the eventual introduction of the Taiwanese semiconductor beetle. Not only do its feeding tunnels encourage premature ion migration, it carries the fungus that causes bit rot.
Actually that fungus that causes bit rot is caused by the lack of lead in the solder that causes "whiskering". Lead kept the whiskering down in circuits; it's removal means now that many forms of electronics will simply "wear out" over time. The whiskers are little tiny cylinders of tin, a conductor, and they tend to grow on new circuits over time. http://archive.evaluationengineering.com/archive/articles/0606/0606lead-free.asp has a good description and accompanying photomicrographs. Lead has been legislated out of solder by RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) acts in various countries under a variety of names.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
"...and--oddly enough--electrical equipment like circuit breakers."
Odd, yes, but very true. I live in San Antonio, TX, and I have had two electrical boxes and a window A/C unit destroyed by fire ants. They seem to be attracted to running electrical equipment.
That works only if fire ants don't evolve to have multiple queens in one colony, like the fire ants here in Texas did. To add insult to injury, the worker fire ants will not feed all the queens the same foods, making it difficult to kill all the queens in a colony through poisoning.
How soon before these flies start dive bombing humans and laying their maggot eggs in human heads? Sounds like reality is about to turn into a bad X-Files episode.
--
Slow Poke
These are not zombies. They are, in fact, very very small mind flayers.
About twenty years ago, my home air conditioner stopped blowing cold. I called a heating/cooling company to check out the problem and it turned out that ants had crawled into the compressor unit outside my house and mucked up a relay.
The technician's work consisted of:
1. identify that little burnt ant bodies were gumming up the works
2. brush the relay clean.
At about the same time, my son was two or three years old. He had the worst luck being stung by these little bastards. If you've ever seen a child attacked by these ants, you know that it can be pretty sickening.
Ever since, anytime I walk past an ant mound I give it a kick just to make their lives unpleasant for a little while.
--Richard
(Austin)
Awwww. Makes me proud. The best country in the world is now taking on the most evil of lawn pests.
Did you know the little bastards chemically signal to themselves? The swarm a leg, and once the first ant bites, the rest bite synchronously.
Unfortunately there apparently aren't enough cow flops to produce a big enough population of these booby-trap-beetles to wipe out the cane toads. So the toads are still a problem.
Get more cows? :)
Mooooooo!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
"The flies, which are USDA -approved, do not attack native ants or species and have been introduced in other Gulf Coast states"
Introduce a bug to squash another bug!
Windows7->WindowsVista->WindowsXP->Windows95...
Actually, I'm very tempted to apply:
1. Occam's Razor. If someone consistently acts stupid, talks stupid, etc, there are two possible explanations:
A: He's stupid.
B: He's a really really smart guy and a great actor, and pretends so well to be stupid that nobody can tell the difference.
I think you'll agree that the first is the simpler explanation.
2. The Peter Principle: everyone keeps getting promoted until they become incompetent for the job they just got promoted to. (E.g., because it needs different skills than the previous one.)
Politicians are actually one of the original examples in Peter's book. To get elected you need charisma, basically. But after you get elected, you need stuff like management skills, you need to know economics, etc. None of those played any role in convincing the people to elect you. So it's quite easy to end up with a bunch of elected politicians who genuinely don't have any more skills than talking convincingly out the arse and looking good in front of a camera. The skills they'd actually need to do a good job in the office, they simply don't have.
Worse yet, we elect those who can _lie_ convincingly or at least conveniently not mention half the truth. My standard example is the Phillips curve: all else being equal (and invariably out of your control), inflation and unemployment depend on each other. You push one down, the other goes up. Now think of all the politicians whose claim to deserving the office is, basically, "OMG, under the current government there is inflation! We'll reduce that!" or conversely for unemployment. But they never mention that their plan involves the other going _up_. If they told you that, that would be political suicide. So their getting elected depends on claiming to get one up, while strongly implying and getting you to assume (though not actually saying so) that the other will obviously stay put.
Or occasionally one promises to solve both. 'Cause, I suppose, if you're going to lie anyway, might as well go all the way.
Then we wonder how come they lie after they got elected, instead of actually doing what they promised. Duh. Because we tested their ability to lie, not the ability to do what they promised. We just promoted someone to a position for which they're unqualified and incompetent.
3. As a bonus: Hanlon's Razor. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't doubt that some of the above mentioned don't outright lie, but genuinely Peter's Principle applies. They don't understand economics well enough to know that they're promising an impossibility.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have had it with these motherfuckin' ants, on this motherfuckin' circuitry!
'eldavojohn' writes: "...eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain..."
Three adjectives, no less.
Exactly who is the submitter? :-)
I saw this story on the local news in DFW tonight. It reminded me of the following NatGeo youtube clip of the parasitic wasp:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMG-LWyNcAs
It is WELL worth watching. For the ADHD crowd, skip to 3:25.
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I dunno why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she'll die
Is this the basis for the next George A. Romero film?
I've had many of my solar powered lawn lights turn into ant farms simply because they make great shelter. Ants love warmth. Here's an experiment: Get an empty paint can, drill a small hole on the side near the bottom and set it outside preferably in an out of the way yet sunny part of the yard; e.g. by a fence. Watch how fast that sucker fills up with ants. With the sun beating down on telephone and cable hookup boxes, in my neighborhood about half of them have ant mounds around them. And yard transformers are warm all year round, the little buggers get inside and pile up moist dirt until they reach the conductors and bzzzt! What amazes me is how high they'll climb to build a nest- At a previous neighborhood where the utilities were strung up on poles, I called the phone company complaining of line noise one day, so they came out and found an ant nest inside the rubber boot on the pole 25 feet in the air.
But where I live, ants aren't so much a problem in window AC units as brown paper wasps are...
You can see those zombie ants in Planet Earth documentary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(TV_series)#8._.22Jungles.22
When they mentioned bringing the natural predator from another continent, I imagined this.
Now, that would be a cool animal to set loose in Texas!
It seems to me it they have an attraction to electrical equipment that would solve the problem of attracting them to an electronic ant zapper.
Hi, I'm a zombifying parasite. You may remember me from such insects as cockroaches and grasshoppers.
Great. Eventually the flies will decide they like human brains more than ant brains. (Seems like a no brainer to me). Then we'll start to see people dragging their feet, kind of looking like they'd missed their morning coffee, for a few days... Final stage: You hear someone shuffle up behind you, then hear BRAINNSSS. Thus begins Zombie Apocalypse...
Yes, but the probability of her having a real vagina is 99,99%.
It's 6:23 in the AM, and this is what's sitting on my RSS reader:
Some days you just want to crawl back into bed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Animal, vegetable, or mineral?
Screw taxonomy. If it moves, it's an animal, eat it. If it don't move, it might be vegetable, eat it. If it wasn't a vegetable, you needed your minerals anyway.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Many politicians just pretend to be stupid because in many cases voters prefer voting for people who are like them (i.e. stupid).
Per my subject, dumb people don't know dumb from smart. I read it on the interpedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_effect), so it must be true!
This means the lower the IQ score of an individual, the less capably he or she can appreciate and accurately appraise others' intelligence. The lower someone's IQ, the more likely he is to rate himself as more intelligent than those around him.
If dumb people want someone who's dumb, they could pick just about anyone: they don't know who's actually smart, and they think they're smarter anyways, so in their eyes everyone else is dumb.
Oooh! Look! Shiny!
Best Slashdot Co
Making zombies. What a fine idea. *goes back to playing Left 4 Dead 24/7*
Send your spendthrift head of state this
This is a very good idea. Nothing can possibly go wrong!
Could we put lasers on the frikkin' flies' heads?
And the best part is, if the cows get out of control, we've already got effective (and tasty) methods of dealing with that problem.
greatly. was a study conducted before this was done?
you cant just mix baking soda into vinegar to solve your vinegar problem.
the flies are an uncontrolled natural variable.
once out of ants the flies will adapt to other insects as a food source.
in 10 years, be prepared to fight the flies instead.
eventually it may come to pass these flies may not have a natural predator, or may have destroyed all available natural predators by this time.
Good people go to bed earlier.
didn't we already have another ant fighting Texas fire ants?
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/15/129244
Swarming Ants Destroy Electronics in Texas
Posted by timothy on Thursday May 15, @07:34AM from the where's-tiny-ender-when-you-need-him dept.
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."
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Here's a solution.
All this fly does is attack these ants, and no other ant.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
There was a problem with cattle dung... ... several feet across
Eww.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I'm sure the ant loves to die like this simply because humans entered his environment and don't want him there. Excellent work, keep it up.
What could go wrong?
"The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies" I knew a few co-workers who were like that. ~:-)
And it's a good thing that species are incapable of adapting to their environments, especially ones with short lifecycles that produce lots of young! I mean imagine if they could attack all the other species of ants instead of just one, it would be a total disaster! But there's no record of useful insects evolving undesirable traits and becoming a dangerous pest, so it should be totally safe. They're USDA-approved, after all.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Finally they found a BIG dung beetle that would use cow flops. The cane toads would eat this one, too. But it was a big hardy bug. So it would dig its way out of the toad. Problem (and toad) solved. B-)
"I'm not trapped inside of you...YOU'RE TRAPPED WITH ME INSIDE!"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This is an utterly utterly utterly disgusting picture you just painted in my head. I just lost my appetite thank you.
They should combine this approach with the one that uses mushrooms to infect and kill insects, that way it is a double whammy!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I agree.
Brings to mind a quote:
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
Abraham Lincoln
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
"What I did was wrong." "As an act of contrition, I will now insert this carnivorous phorid fly maggot into my brain. " "Kind of tickles." [Screaming] "Oh, God! It's eating out the back of my eyes! "
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
The sustainable population of cows is limited by the availability of water and forage, both of which I hear are in short supply in Australia. Ecological damage and erosion caused by cattle overgrazing may exceed the damage caused by cane toads. And no one wants to eat an emaciated cow -- it's the fat that makes them so tasty.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"It's called Eco-Kill, Hank. The government would not let them use the term "eco" unless it was ecologically safe."
They're called cow pies. Cow flops are the successful end of cow tipping.
...I learned in preschool.
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.
I dunno why she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she'll die.
There was an old lady who swallowed a spider, ... and so on ...
That wiggled and wiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly -
Perhaps she'll die.
She dies in the end.
Moist looked around, sorting hastily through the Post Office's recent little problems. Apart from Drumknott, who was standing by his master with an attitude of deferential alertness, they were alone.
"Look, I can explain," he said.
Lord Vetinari lifted an eyebrow with the care of one who, having found a piece of caterpillar in his salad, raises the rest of the lettuce.
"Pray do," he said, leaning back.
"We got a bit carried away," said Moist. "We were a bit too creative in our thinking. We encouraged mongooses to breed in the posting boxes to keep down the snakes . . ."
Lord Vetinari said nothing.
"Er . . . which, admittedly, we introduced into the letter boxes to reduce the numbers of toads . . ."
Lord Vetinari repeated himself.
"Er . . . which, it's true, staff put in the posting boxes to keep down the snails . . . "
Lord Vetinari remained unvocal.
"Er . . . These, I must in fairness point out, got into the boxes of their own accord, in order to eat the glue on the stamps," said Moist, aware that he was beginning to burble.
"Well, at least you were saved the trouble of having to introduce them yourselves," said Lord Vetinari cheerfully. "As you indicate, this may well have been a case where chilly logic should have been replaced by the common sense of, perhaps, the average chicken. But that is not the reason I asked you to come here today."
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I though Mark Twain said that...
What if the flys develop a taste for HUMAN BRAINS ??
Has it ever happened ?
What about small mamals or Armadillos ??
When they zombified the fireants, I said nothing
because I was not a fireant...
Here in South Africa we have loads of brainless people in government, i.e. loads of Zombies. The government has full control over our countries power supply, which is terrible. And if zombie ants are attracted to power cables, it explains why our country keeps having power shortages, the president keeps eating the cables at our power stations!!
I looked it up again it looks like it's attributed to George Eliot, Abraham Lincoln (also Confucius), Mark Twain, and finally the bible.
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. -- 'Proverbs' 17:28.
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.