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A Floating Mass of Fire Ants in Texas
- zimzim 9y agocolony remain 1 million ants!
- dovdovdov 9y agoyou can't keep the drones!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nvahalik 9y agoOf interest in the article is this: > flooded fire ants deliver higher doses of venom because they have 165 percent as much venom inside them as normal fire ants Growing up in rural Texas I can assure you that fire ants were never to be messed with (unless you had fire/gasoline). I got stung once 3 or 4 times on my ankle, which was swollen for about 3 days. The bites were hug. The oozed a milky liquid. We doused them in calamine lotion, but it still didn't stop something like arthritis from hurting. Having been stung by wasps and bees, I find those preferable to fire ant stings. I couldn't imagine getting stung by something over 50% worse.
- mawburn 9y agoThat doesn't happen to everyone. They are just a minor irritation for me, the bite itself is the worst part. Sometimes it'll itch for a couple days with a little pimple, but even that's rare. I know people who bruise and break out horribly from them, though.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoPerhaps you have a mild allergy?
- alyandon 9y agoSounds like you are allergic. When I sustain bites they are virtually painless for me but they form those annoying pus filled blisters that last for a few days and itch like crazy.
- unethical_ban 9y agoI think you're allergic to fire ants. They hurt, and you do get those zit-like sores, but I would much rather get a few fire ant bites than a bee or especially a wasp sting.
- tasty_freeze 9y agoAustinite here. I've been bitten hundreds of times by fire ants. Often, a couple dozen bites at a time (eg, doing yard work in tall grass, not realizing I'm standing next to a fire ant mound, and getting swarmed before I know it). They are far less painful than wasp stings, by a factor of 100 or more. On the other hand, a wasp sting goes away pretty quickly, but fire ant bites usually result in pimple-like sores that itch, and it takes the better part of a way to go away.
- selimthegrim 9y agoPity the grad student responsible for generating this number.
- btilly 9y agoRead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index and walk away in disbelief.
- hughdbrown 9y agoAnd the infographic: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-colorful-pain-index-of-the-stinging-ants-bees-and-wasps-around-the-world http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-colorful-pain-index...
- conductr 9y ago> Baldfaced Hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door. > Sweat Bees: Light and ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm. Haha, the pain descriptions remind me of a wine menu
- selimthegrim 9y agoNot game ending options in Zork?
- grkvlt 9y agoI love the yellowjacket description: > hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
- daleco 9y agoA few years ago, I got stung by one on my Ankle in Florida. I still have a scar (5mm circle). I wouldn't imagine swimming on one of these nest, I would probably die...
- paulpauper 9y agoit would be terrifying wading though the water and seeing a huge mound of fire ants ants floating nearby
- trynewideas 9y agoThere are far more terrifying things in flood waters than fire ants, starting with sewage and bacteria, moving on up to animals driven mad from drinking the water, and then on to stepping into a bloated dead corpse. I remember the cows that went mad from drinking salt water post-Rita and thinking that I'd take a zombie attack over insane dying cows screaming while wading through the bloated corpses of the herd's dead. At least the ants are quiet, don't stink, and are frankly more motivated to stay alive by retaining their ball than to pursue you. They're way more of a threat to floating bodies (and the people recovering or disposing of those bodies) than to living evacuees.
- drone 9y agoTo be fair, as someone who walked into one of these masses during the Baytown flood of the 90's (back when the San Jacinto caught on fire, that one), I'll take screaming cows, snakes, and rabid raccoons over floating masses of fire ants. All the former can be shot or kept away with a stick, not to mention seen from a distance. Those ant rafts can sneak around between other floating detritus and catch you by surprise, and there is no defense once they catch you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoTexans are often regarded as having an affinity for gun ownership. I think that's silly. They clearly should all be packing flame-throwers.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoWho says HN hates humor?
- alyandon 9y agoIndeed. I hate those things and conduct vicious chemical warfare against any nests that pop up in my yard. There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. I guess I've learned something new today.
- stephenhuey 9y agoHoustonian here. Apparently all you need is some Dawn soap to break their surface tension! I've always been fascinated by ants since childhood and love watching them, but these floating islands are the worst ambush I can imagine. Good to know they have a kryptonite.
- yourapostasy 9y agoBefore readers run out and try this, there is a technique and protocol that should be followed, or you won't like the consequences. I'll let a post on /r/natureismetal do the typing for me [1], and here's a copy-pasta for those who don't want to click through (more scientific explanation [2] of why this works within seconds...to make sure around these bastards from hell, I gave 'em two minutes to display proof of death---put a stick in the drowned mass and lift it up---before I moved on to hunting down the next raft): -------- clip here -------- You're all going to love this. It's environmentally friendly, it's inexpensive, it's 100% lethal, and makes them die in the most horrible manner possible. Dish soap. Put a tablespoon or two into a spray bottle, then add about 2-3 cups of water. Swish the water to mix. Do not shake! You don't want foam in the bottle. MOVE. UP. STREAM. Seriously, you don't want to be downstream of this when it happens. Now, starting in the middle of the mass, start spritzing with the soapy water, and work your way out to the edges. The soap will break the surface tension, and act as a wetting agent on the ants. As a result, the water will now start wicking up their bodies, enveloping them like living quicksand. And with the surface tension broken, the mass of ants will start to sink. Remember, start in the middle! This will cause the center to sink first, and drag the edges down last. The ants will all hold on to each other and drag every last one below the surface. With a soft bloop, the entire mass will drop. Remember how I said to move upstream? If you're downstream, the entire submerged mass could end up wrapped around your legs. Where they will immediately begin clawing their way to the surface, using you as a ladder. Best of all, you can scale up your operation, and load a backpack sprayer with a bottle of Dawn and a few gallons of water. Then just wade through your neighborhood, wiping them out for the benefit of everyone! -------- clip here -------- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/comments/6wkd4j/fireants_create_a_floating_island_of_themselves/dm90hkg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/comments/6wkd4j/firea... [2] https://www.livescience.com/13867-raft-fire-ants-buoyancy-flood-water-repellant-floatation.html https://www.livescience.com/13867-raft-fire-ants-buoyancy-fl...
- dhimes 9y agoI hope someone from The Atlantic sees this: I will whitelist you for ads but not for trackers. Ads are ok, trackers are the tools of Satan.
- skybrian 9y agoMaybe use incognito mode?
- ajmurmann 9y agoIf you use Ghostery you can whitelist different "tools" independently. It's very easy to allow all ads and block all trackers. You can also decide to only block certain ads or trackers for specific websites.
- fish_fan 9y agoNot to mention you can pay to get the ads to go away and block anything that remains.
- dhimes 9y agoI've subscribed to the Atlantic dead tree version in the past. I have no problem with that. But their using trackers makes be suspicious that paying won't make the problem go away- only that I won't see it anymore. EDIT: I could clarify: I tried whitelisting the ads and that wasn't good enough. They wanted me to whitelist the trackers too.
- fish_fan 9y agoWell, the ads going away is easily visible. I wouldn't stop blocking though; they most definitely continue to track.
- keithpeter 9y agoI just ude Firefox with javascript turned off (about:config search javascript, toggle javascript.enabled to false). No apparent anything.
- tabeth 9y agoCould humans realistically do something similar by grabbing on to one another with arms extended out (imagine three people, A onto B and C, B onto A and C, and so forth). People have been able to do some crazy things, like these ants, under the right circumstances. It's always so sad to see people drown. It would be neat if we could create an emergency human raft in such desperate times in a pinch.
- QAPereo 9y agoSadly no, the area/volume/power relationships are wrong, a bit like people flying by flapping hard enough. We also lack exoskeletal structures, so we'd be crushed.
- tabeth 9y agoI was thinking something more of the lines of length/width than height (in the case of the ants). Though, I feel your point applies there as well.
- NathanKP 9y agoThe ants are small enough and light enough that they float because of surface tension. These ant rafts operate on a similar effect to how Gerridae (pond skaters) walk on the water's surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerridae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerridae The human body is far too dense and large for surface tension based floating to work. Humans can survive reasonably long times in water by employing the Dead Man's Float though.
- yourapostasy 9y agoNo, and not even in the Dead Sea [1], unless they start with linked arms on shore, walk into that sea, and link legs as soon as they can, so they all face upwards. [1] http://io9.gizmodo.com/5798844/why-so-many-people-drown-in-the-dead-sea http://io9.gizmodo.com/5798844/why-so-many-people-drown-in-t...
- patch_collector 9y agoThat is a recommended form if everyone has life preservers on (especially if you have small children -- they float in the middle of the group), but like the others have said, without additional flotation devices, it doesn't work.
- rwallace 9y ago> There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. The area where the fire ants landed may be crawling with stinging ants for a while. “But it’ll have absolutely no ticks. So it’ll be lovely from that perspective,” says Wild. Sounds like on balance they might do more good than harm, then? Fire ant stings are painful, but they're nothing compared to Lyme disease.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- abakker 9y agocan we import them to CT?
- 24gttghh 9y agoMA to ME already have a different species of Fire ants[0]; from Europe though, not S. America. Please do not purposely import these foreign species. [0]https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/2550e/ https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/2550e/
- abakker 9y agoshould clarify that I am not serious. I've just had Lyme disease enough times to want to kill ticks. Better solution, AFAICT, is aggressive reduction in deer populations. Hunting and predator reintroduction to bring deer population down into historical norms would seemingly reduce a major host/transport mechanism, and would have secondary benefits for the hardwood forest ecosystem.
- eric_h 9y agoYes - bring back the wolves!
- 9y ago
- redm 9y agoI live just north of Houston and while checking out the flood waters, I saw just such masses, several of them in fact. If you do bump into them, or they bump into you, they will swarm you.
- rajasinghe 9y agoPerhaps I missed it, but are all the ants alive in this raft? Seems tricky to manage without some of them being submerged underwater for an extended period of time..
- josephg 9y agoSome of the ants will drown. But they use the arrangement of bodies to trap air bubbles, keeping the colony as a whole afloat and alive. Its an amazing trick to have figured out.
- Lordarminius 9y ago> to have figured out. ?
- powelles 9y agoHere is a short clip my brother sent me a few days ago. http://i.imgur.com/QllUKZe.gifv http://i.imgur.com/QllUKZe.gifv They are very much alive.
- odammit 9y agoI stepped about knee deep into a fire ant mound when I was 8 in Florida. I thought I was going to die. I've never seen something swarm quite that fast.
- inetknght 9y agothe mound just collapsed around your foot and you sank in?
- saidajigumi 9y agoAccidentally stepping in or standing on a fire ant mound is a terrible rite of passage for kids in Florida. Even if you just step on one, which when inactive can look like just another a patch of sand, those little bastards swarm out crazy fast. They'll easily be halfway up your leg before you realize what's happening. One moment, you're tossing a ball or frisbee with friends and waiting for the next throw, the next: horrible child screaming.
- blantonl 9y agoThey actually swarm first without biting and then once they get a critical mass covered they chemically send a command to all bite at once. I’m not kidding.
- spyhi 9y agoI lived in Texas for a while and we had fire ants on our property every so often. One time I was taking out the trash, and a lone ant got on my hand, but was just wandering around aimlessly. I watched it for probably a full two minutes, and then completely out of the blue it decided to bite me. Only years later did I learn that the behavior you mentioned is what I was seeing.
- odammit 9y agoSo they are evil incarnate. I had them in an extremely large mound by another house I lived in as an adult. I tossed a handle of 151 into it and lit it on fire. Payback.
- jrowley 9y agoThat would suck for you, but would be good from a ecological perspective - eating red meat isn't our most sustainable practice.
- Glyptodon 9y agoSomehow I keep expecting Texans to roast the ants from their boats with flamethrowers pieced together from converted gas grills as they go about rescuing the stranded. edit: lol, apparently I'm not the only one.
- lordlimecat 9y agoSpray bottle with soapy water would probably do the trick just as easily.
- macintux 9y agoPer another comment, that's a terrible possibly-fatal idea if you're careless enough to do it downstream.
- keithpeter 9y agoUK: ageing hipster in a temperate and tectonically inactive area of the North - not complacent just grateful... The more I hear of Texans, the better it gets. Best of luck all.
- munificent 9y agoTexans are like Floridians with more panache.
- exabrial 9y agoA little bit of watered down dawn in a hand sprayer would fix that... Coincidentally this reminds me of a really strange MacGyver episode from the 80s
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI find it interesting that during this period this invasive species is vulnerable to attack. It also makes me wonder about all of the other nominally 'land' based insects. Beetles? Other species of ants? spiders? What is the insect ecosystem impact of a huge die off like this? Does it make native species more vulnerable? give them breathing room (presumably they would have evolutionary advantages to surviving these events if they evolved in the area).
- caycep 9y agoWasn't there some sort of classical math problem that this illustrates somehow? surface tension, math theory, etc? (my memory for this sort of thing isn't great)
- pritam2020 9y agoI am back to ... one million ants
- buckysballs 9y agoUnreal
- joering2 9y agoI'm sorry but how is this got to be on the first page of HN? I seen similar article on.. DailyMail. How is this related to hacking and technology? Just curious...
- lightedman 9y agoIt doesn't, much like the Rob Vagg/Node.js internal politics story we had the other day.
- jhayward 9y ago> There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks So what we need is a bio-engineered species of fire ant that requires some harmless environmental additive to survive. Then we breed them, release them over a tick-infested area, and let them breed long enough to kill off the ticks. Then quit spraying or watever the additive they need and let them die off. What Could Go Wrong. But seriously, screw ticks and fire ants.
- sverige 9y ago>But seriously, screw ticks and fire ants. Yes. Burn them with fire.
- marcosdumay 9y agoHey, this one we are good at. How wide is the area you want to burn?
- blisterpeanuts 9y agoDo ants require venom to kill ticks? A species of fire ant that is engineered to be non-venomous might be a win-win: tough survivors that eat ticks.
- kqr2 9y agoReminds me of a Simpson's episode where X eats Y keeps escalating... Since the town considered the pigeons to be a nuisance, they are delighted that the lizards have eaten all the pigeons. So, Bart is thanked and honored by Mayor Quimby with a loganberry scented candle. Lisa worries the town will now become infested by lizards rather than the pigeons, but Skinner assures her they will send in "wave after wave of" Chinese needle snakes to eat the lizards, followed by snake-eating gorillas, and then "when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_the_Mother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_the_Mother
- shawnee_ 9y agoscrew ticks and fire ants Diatomaceous earth will do the job. It can be purchased at any farm supply store for pretty cheap. Works on fleas, bedbugs, millipedes, roaches, centipedes ... pretty much any little bug with an exoskeleton. Farm supply store because it's traditionally been used to mix into agricultural feed (food grade DE) as an anti-caking agent. But works to kill bugs, too. Diatoms in this form are fossilized like microscopic weapons of destruction that get under the exoskeletons of ants and other creepy crawlies and dehydrate them. Best of all: no chemicals involved so they cannot develop resistance. Medieval torture devices on bugs; will desiccate them.
- cyberferret 9y agoThe programming of nature has always fascinated me... Animals and insects always seem to have some mysterious ways of handling environmental calamities and surviving. I recall an incident a few years ago here where I live in Australia. We live close to a series of cliffs overlooking a beach, and I walk along those cliffs every morning. There was one day when I noticed strange lumps on the grass and walking track. Upon closer observation, I saw that these were hundreds, nay, thousands of hermit crabs, and they were crawling across the ground and heading for every tree and bush in the vicinity, then climbing up them as high as they could. I had NEVER seen hermit crabs do this before. Then, two days later, we had a huge storm hit, and combined with unusually high tides, it ended up with most of the cliff top areas being flooded or overrun with water. How on earth did all these hermit crabs know that this was about to happen 48 hours in advance of the event?? How did they know that they had to climb the cliffs and seek out higher ground within the trees and bushes there? There must be an amazing environmental consciousness just thrumming along outside of 'civilised' human perception that I wish we could tap back into...
- zeta0134 9y agoSo many birds and insects seem to be sensitive to the magnetic forces deep within the planet. I've never met a human being who was consciously aware of these forces, but I've met plenty of spiritualists who called them something else. Ask any old person whose body reacts to pressure changes in the weather, and they'll point out which bones ache when a storm is approaching. They're usually right. As humans, we brush it off. It's just a feeling, or we're having a bad headache, and need to take some medicine. To a small insect whose entire world can change in a flash though, these signals are a monumentally important part of how they sense the world. Especially I think in absence of more complex visual perception that we humans use to bridge the gap. Nature is amazing! The more we study it, the less we realize we actually know.
- cyberferret 9y agoI do recall reading about an experiment many years ago where a group of university students were blindfolded and taken to a remote hill outside of their town. They were then (still blindfolded) asked to point to their homes, and it turns out that most of them managed to point fairly accurately in the direction where they lived. No idea of the validity or scientific basis for that 'experiment', but as you mentioned - that mysterious ability for older people to 'feel' weather changes in parts of their bodies, or that 'gut feeling' that a lot of people get when they are being watched by hostile eyes... There is a lot more going on to our unconscious perception of the world that we realise. There are some facets however, that are easily explainable, such as people "smelling the rain coming" when it is in fact the higher moisture content in the air making our smell receptors work better at smelling the everyday environment around us... But there are some phenomena which aren't as easily explained. I hope that we can begin to be more adept at recognising the unconscious prompts, which I think will make us much better are relating to the world around us.
- gameshot911 9y agoSo what happens to the ants on the bottom of the pile?
- Graziano_M 9y agoThey couldn't survive forever, of course, but they're small enough that they actually bring down little bubbles of air.
- ngneer 9y agoAnyone else notice how circular that mass was? Nature loves economy.