Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants 398
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."
Oh yeah..great idea except when things go wrong... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:What stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Stock Tip... (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatever company that makes RAID (bug spray, not disk stuff)...
BUY!
The product will be needed soon, and in great quantities.
San Antonio (Score:2, Interesting)
Nature will find a way (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:What stupidity. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hence, sometimes people distinguish between animals and fish
Animals and fish? I don't think I've ever heard that split before. People often say things like "well at least we're not animals," or "humans can contemplate their existence, unlike animals," however I feel like that just stems from not having a precise term defining the set of all animals, minus humans.
Of course, even if we did have such a term, would it include homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthals? At what point would we be considered separate from the rest of the animal kingdom?
Getting back to the animals, we have several terms that can mean different things. For example a vegetarian might say "I don't eat meat," but in common parlance of lots of cookbooks (especially cookbooks over a decade or two old) you have meat, poultry, fish, game, and pork.
So-called pescetarians might eat plants + seafood, or just plants + fish. Wikipedia indicates that the word is a portmanteau of the Italian word pesce [wikipedia.org] ("fish") + vegetarian; if a person eats things beyond just fish (e.g. crustaceans), should we use a different word?
"Omnivore" isn't much better, as I certainly don't eat everything. I can't even eat tomato plants and rhubarb leaves -- things that look remotely edible. But people generally understand each other, even if our words aren't as precisely specified as much people would like.
Re:What stupidity. (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently a big component of the attraction is that electric-fried fire ants smell really good to other fire ants
Re:The CSIRO would disagree with you (Score:1, Interesting)
After a few horrendous early bad attempts (Cane Toads for example) Australia's CSIRO (the government's research arm) has gotten very very good [csiro.au] 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 [sciencedirect.com],
About the artice You've linked to: what is worth mentioning here, is that while you can read between the lines that in Australia this "environmental engineering" was in fact successful, for unknown reasons it failed in Kruger National Park, South Africa...
WM
Re:Misleading Headline (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why we in Denmark join words. The headline would read:
Texas Makes Zombiefireants
The problem is when people then forget to join them. Because we are used to joined words, it makes it extra hard to not read the ambiguous meaning.
Bring the over-overlords! (Score:5, Interesting)
When they mentioned bringing the natural predator from another continent, I imagined this [linkbrazil.com.br].
Now, that would be a cool animal to set loose in Texas!
Re:Occam's Razor & Peter Principle (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you read this
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf [apa.org]
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.
Re:The CSIRO would disagree with you (Score:3, Interesting)
the first highly visible superpredator that you find, and bringing it back. (Cane Toads, Mongooses, Wolves, etc) ...and house cat...
Australia has a bad feline problem too. They were imported to deal with ever increasing rodent populations as a result of the growing agro and ranching economy. Thankfully the Aborigines were quick to add them to their diet.
It seems house cats have very poor endurance and can be stalked rather successfully. At the end of the hunt the Aborigines literally walk right up to it and smash its head. The cat is simply too tired to run any further.