Obviously, you’ve never had your entire leg bitten by a nest of them. Thirty years later, I still have some scars.
Actually I have. On more than one occasion. I must not scar as easily as you, though. 
Fire ants are an annoyance. Termites cost me money. Given a choice between the two, I’ll take the fire ants.
Fire ants are more than an annoyance. They can be deadly if you are severely allergic to their venom and don’t know it.
Technically, it was Monday that they had a front page article on fire ants, for anyone researching it.
True, but so can peanut butter.
And I don’t consider peanut butter even mildly annoying.
It interesting, but I’ve noticed that in these parts fire ants seem to have tken to building their nests in areas where they are less likely to be disturbed. At the edge of concrete slabs, for example, rather than in the center of a lawn. If they confine themselves to that sort of area, I can live with 'em.
I’ve also noticed that the fire ants that have made it this far don’t seem to have as brutal a bit as ones I’ve encountered in more southerly locations (such as Mississippi, where I spent part of my childhood). Makes me wonder if there is some hybridization going on.
Any organism fits into a ecosystem somehow. Every organism is preyed on (or somehow subsists on) and is prey for other organisms, and contributes to ecosystem functioning in some way. Whether it is “good” or “bad” or has “value” is entirely a subjective value made by humans. Is a higher diversity “good”? Is increased ecosystem biomass “better,” or would you prefer a more rapid rate of nutrient cycling? Unless you specify what you regard as “good” it is impossible to answer the question.
Fire ants are certainly a nuisance for humans, especially so in areas like North America where they have been introduced and have no natural enemies (or less efficient ones than in their homeland), and so can spread nearly unchecked. They are undoubtedly detrimental to other species besides humans; and are also probably beneficial to some others.
Even with respect to “benefits” for humans like possible effects on termites, it’s not enough to know that the ants eat termites - they also must be better at controlling termites than other species they might have replaced.
Fire ants are good for themselves. That’s all the justification for their existence they really need. Humans are very very good for fire ants. Humans are not so good for humans when they spread critters like fire ants around.
It is my understanding that in parts of Asia some women tape or glue them to their nipples in order to lighten and/or pinken their areole (areoli?).
Say, did you wander over here from this thread?
I heard an estimate on Animal Planet just the other day that the total of the world’s ants outweigh the total of any other species. I’m pretty sure that’s true about the desert. When we still had a dog that I took out on the desert I noticed that ant hills are all over the place.
Thanks for all the responses so far, folks.
Its true that it’s not up to fire ants to make themselves useful, or at least less annoying, to humans, but damn, are they ever a pestilence in the suburban environment. I was therefore wondering what useful (to humans, eventually) purposes they may serve, outside of maintaining their own anty lifestyles. So far, the most plausible thing I’ve heard is that the churning of the soil around their nests provides aeration, and perhaps some fertilizing function. I suppose they also provide a food source for some larger lifeforms, but the dang bugs are so small that one has to think that one would have to hoover up millions of the things to get one through till supper.
BTW, two days ago one of the ants rummaging around my desk stung me between the second and third finger of my left hand. Today a wierd little white pustule, like an overstuffed zit, appeared at the site. I could practically watch it grow over the course of a couple of hours, then it rather dramatically popped. See, if all these ants did was run around and carry off crumbs of food like most of their brethren, I’d be fine, but it’s stuff like the above that has me wishing for a nice sterilizing gamma ray burst from a nearby nova.
A surgically targeted “nice sterilizing gamma ray burst” I hope.
Well, yeah, of course; I mean, hitting a swath from Texas up to about Tennessee should be sufficient.
(I keed, I keed)
Well, yes. I was thinking areole while reading the ant thread. A streach, I know, but…
They are very useful for cleaning remnants of meat from inside conch or whelk shells or crab specimens brought home from the beach to be used for display. Simply place the shell or crab (dead, of course) on an ant mound, and a couple of days later they will have been picked clean by the ants.
Interesting sidebar: The armadillos in my yard seem to love to dig up fire ant mounds. I suppose their scaly skin protects them from stings, and the ant larvae are a treat for them.
This thread has timely piqued my interest (thanks, El Kabong), as the nursery I work at is currently re-evaluating our shipping method of treating for fire ants.
So, ina search around, found that they may be contributing to the decline, in Texas, of the Horned Toad Lizard population, due to many factors, but sounds like imported fire ants have a large role. That does it for me, I really love the Horned Toads, so fire ants suck.
That said, I also found a nice article , PDF file, heads up, titled “Invasion of the Red Fire Ant: A Multi Layered Metaphor for Managing Invasion Through the Study of Behavior” by Tucker Murphy. Nicely written, with great kudos to E.O. Wilson, who, as a budding teen entomologist in Alabama, did his earliest work on the then newly arrived invaders. Worth a read.
Another little-known fact about fire ants is that they are all called Joe.
Since they are almost all females, I would suspect they are all called Jo.
That’s actually what they want you to suspect.
Well, not nessesarily invasive species, at least to start. Which fire ants are.
Even invasive species are generally preyed on by something (in the case of fire ants, the armadillo mentioned by Sharky, for example), but the predators are just not effective in controlling their population. And invasive species certainly affect ecosystem functioning, but they often may shift it to a new and different equilibrium.