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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."
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.
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Your quote:
Introducing foreign species, even to battle other foreign species /NEVER WORKS/.
I'm not sure about never but there are often unforeseen consequences. Even Looney Toons had a classic cartoon on this.
In some cases, biological pest control can have unforeseen negative results that could outweigh all benefits. For example, when the mongoose was introduced to Hawaii in order to control the rat population, it preyed on the endemic birds of Hawaii, especially their eggs, more often than it ate the rats.
Cane toads (Bufo marinus) were introduced to Australia in the 1930s in a failed attempt to control the cane beetle, a pest of sugar cane crops. 102 toads were obtained from Hawaii and bred in captivity to increase their numbers until they were released into the sugar cane fields of the tropic north in 1935. It was later discovered that the toads can't jump very high so they did not eat the cane beetles which stayed up on the upper stalks of the cane plants. The toads soon became very numerous and out-competed native species and became very harmful to the Australian environment, including being very toxic to would-be predators such as native snakes.
- Ref:
You said:
Not animals. Insects. The distinction does matter.
Once again I will quote Wikipedia:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Mandibulata
Class: Insecta
and:
Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet.
People are animals too, as are insects and worms and fish and dogs and frogs.
Being a member of Animalia usually means you're an animal, but the common term animal is not universally applied to Parazoa/Porifera(sponges) even though sponges are technically part of the "Animal kingdom".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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)
Why were you modded +5 insightful? You're just wrong. I have to plant a wasp larva on you for trying to get away with this.
Go here and read about 20 years of successful biological control of pest insect species
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
I think he was saying that there must also be ants that are native to Texas and that these flies will damage their populations, in addition to the foreign fire ant populations.
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
It's not always bad. Cactoblastis caterpillar larvae introduction was pretty effective against prickly pear.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Have you ever read the essay, "Santaland Diaries," by David Sedaris?
No.
Have you ever watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Michael Douglas, the producer, complained to somebody that the mental patients never seem to get out of character. Somebody informed him that many of the extras on the film were recruited from an actual mental hospital.
I'm not going to mention Kramer here.
I live near the University of Texas college and personally know many people involved in the research of these fly's. Many teams involved have all told me the same story; there is a toxin found exclusively inside the fire ant thorax that the fly's sense and are drawn to. They did not go into more detail that I could retain as I am not a biochemist, I simply felt I could contribute to the Slashdot community with personal knowledge that the article lacked.
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
Exhibit B: Crown of Thorns Starfish
At one point these poor asteroidea were cut into pieces as a form of population control. People realized that the population was doubling. Turns out, they can regrow into separate functioning organisms.
Kinda like fantasia and mickey mouse and the brooms, y'know.
***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/.***
A bit too absolute perhaps. Phorid flies are picky eaters. Part of the problem is that phorids that attack the native fire ants -- which are not considered to be much of a problem (in the US) -- don't find the non-native fire ants -- which are a problem here -- appealing. The proposal it to release phorids that are the natural enemies of the non-native fire ants and do not attack the indigenous species.
I suspect that if you had ever encountered Solenopsis wagneri, your opinions on the introductions of natural controls might be a bit less rigid.
see http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~gilbert/research/fireants/faqans.html#which
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey