There’s a reason that a favorite trick of the Comanches was to tie someone down on top of a fire ant mound.
Ants maybe, but not fire ants. They are a recent (1930’s) introduction.
I grew up with them and loved to nuke their beds with lots of gasoline and diesel fuel. I used to get stung many times a day during the summer in rural northern Louisiana and that was just irritating but they can most certainly be very dangerous or deadly. Some people are allergic to them and can’t take many stings at all but almost everyone has their limit.
My best friend had an ATV end-over-end accident and was knocked out face down in a fire ant mound for a better part of an hour before anyone found him. He had to spend a week in hospital for it. The concussion was bad enough but he also had extreme head and face swelling from all the bites and that had to be treated too. I don’t know what would have happened if someone didn’t find him for multiple hours.
I had a female roommate that also managed to get stung tens to hundreds of times as well in college. Her leg swelled up like a balloon and started to turn people. She couldn’t even walk. I had to put her in the back of my pickup and take her straight to the emergency room. They admitted her right away. The nurses only told me it was “blood poisoning” due to the fire ant stings and she would have been in serious danger without medical intervention and they saw similar cases fairly frequently. My roommate was released the next day but not everyone is so lucky.
As noted, you can’t control fire ant populations in total. They are an invasive species that isn’t moving out. You can control them in small areas with due diligence but that is about it.
What, exactly, does one do if one is, say, on a rowboat and is at risk of encountering a fire ant raft? Besides hope really fervently that your boat doesn’t bump into one?
Is there anything you can do (besides scream) if they start to swarm over the side and onto your boat? Diving overboard (and abandoning the boat) would seem to leave you boatless and in the water which is inhabited by fire ant rafts, if you see what I mean…
This is why you wear a life jacket when boating. If you didn’t see the nest in time to evade, and they are swarming the boat, you would jump overboard and swim, swatting any ants off you in the water. Tow the boat with the bow line or push it or something. Maybe the swarming ants would calm down and reform a clump you could shove off the boat with the paddles after 30 minutes or so. Hopefully the water is only sparsely inhabited by these things and not full of downed electrical lines, sharp metal, or sharks…
I know it doesn’t sound remotely as exciting, but a bit of soap should sink the colony rapidly.
The one good thing about fire ant rafts is that they tend to stay together and the individual ants don’t move that quickly. You can generally just push the whole raft away with your paddle and kill any that happen to make it onboard with your hand or foot (you won’t get hurt if you squish them quickly). The worst thing to do would be to jump in the water next to a fire ant raft but even that could be dealt with by submerging, wiping the ants off and swimming away. They can’t catch you. I don’t think it is a good idea to try to disperse them. Their little ant brain mentality is just trying to survive en masse, not attack so just try to work with them that way. They don’t get anything out of stinging people and they know that on some level so just don’t screw with them unless you have to.
OK, I had envisioned the ants grouped together on a piece of plywood, styrofoam or driftwood. The bastards are huddled together and just floating on their own?? They sound like evil buggers all right!
Yes, they generally just float on their own in a big mass until they reach dry land and can come up with a new plan. The ones at the bottom of the pile are generally dead if they have been in the water for an extended period of time. Fire ants generally aren’t something you want to screw with. They are best dealt with using large amounts of fire but that only gets you a truce in the battle. They will send back reinforcements and you can never win the overall war.
I was working for the Florida Department of Agriculture when the “imported fire ant” was advancing down the peninsula. We were taught a couple of techniques for field identification and sampling for lab confirmation. In the field we were to put a couple of individuals onto the back of our hand and watch closely. Native fire ants would bite you. Imported fire ants would bite you, hold on, and sting you repeatedly by moving their abdomen around vigorously. (Ants are close relatives of wasps. Some species are better equipped in the stinger apparatus department than others.) It’s this ability to sting repeatedly into tough skin like humans have that sets these apart from all our native species.
To sample mounds we carried small glass vials with screw tops that we prepared in advance by putting a bit of baby powder inside and shaking to coat the inner walls of the vial. In the field you stuck a topless vial into a mound. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Zillions of the little terrors would swarm the vial and within a couple of seconds it would be brim full of ants that couldn’t climb up the slippery sides. We had to snatch up the vial, screw on the top, and flail our hands to prevent personal damage. I personally collected the first Imported Fire Ants (Solonopsis invicta) ever found in Miami-Dade County. Lemme see, that would have been in 1978. Since then I’ve encountered floating rafts of the demons during several episodes of localized flooding after hurricanes. Personally I’m hoping for a retrovirus with high species specificity for its host.
I was under the impression that there was no such thing as a “native fire ant”, and that all fire ants in the south were transplants.
Trumpy would never hurt anyone.
Solenopsis geminata is one that we were told was/is pre-existing in Florida and was referred to as “a native fire ant” by the entomologists in our state headquarters. Solenopsis invicta was specifically termed the Imported Fire Ant. It invaded my state (Florida) within (my) living memory.
Frankly I’m astounded that my brain has both retained and now made available these little tidbits of information!
Or something living on an introduced species, or something living in an altered echosystem.
Our (introduced) lemon tree out back is home an entire civilisation of (native) gall wasps. It turns out that native gall wasps just love lemon trees, and there are many, many more native gall wasps around than there used to be.
There is the practical logistics of how to do it even if you think it’s a good idea. The US military hasn’t used flamethrowers in a long time. Where do you even get a bunch of flamethrowers and people trained to use them?
Texas.
But it could be done in much easier and safer ways than flamethrowers if there were any point in doing it. If you killed every ant on every raft in Houston it wouldn’t even reduce their local numbers by a fraction of a percent.
There are native fire ants in Texas too who are slowly being driven out of business by the invasive ones. Killing a raft full of ants might be hastening the decline of a local species.
I’d prefer not to be bitten by any of them but do appreciate their appetite for termites, bedbugs and roaches which could be much bigger problems in a flood-ravaged disaster area. Let them sail off on their little rafts and live to invade picnics another day as long as they help keep the termites and roaches in check.