Southeast Texas is full of fire ants. We have black dirt containing lots of clay,
generally referred to as "gumbo." The ants stay underground until it rains.
Then, since they don't have gills, they carry dirt to the surface and build gumbo
mountains.
Normally, it doesn't rain much in the summer; but this year the rain started in early
August and continued through September, nearly making up for the 10-inch deficit that the
weather forecasters truly believe must be overcome, caused by an unusually dry
Winter. As I was mowing the lawn the other day, I encountered about 10 ant gumbo-mountains
in my smallish yard.
Killing these critters is getting harder. It used to be that you could put out some DDT
and the problem was pretty much over. Of course, DDT was outlawed when I was a little kid;
but it doesn't matter, because if they were still using it, it wouldn't work anymore
anyway.
No, fire ants find ways to survive.
A couple of years ago, I had pretty good success with the bait that, supposedly, the
ants take back to the queen for her evening meal. This bait, of course, was poison, and
the queen died. And "when the queen dies, the mound dies," or so the slogan
went.
The ants, it seems, are more intelligent than we might think. (Animal non-rights
activists make a big deal of pointing out that plants have intelligence, but they don't
ever say anything about fire ants.) Since they don't have a central nervous system, we
humans are too stupid to figure out how this works, but if you simply observe fire ant
behavior, it becomes apparent that the intelligence is indeed there.
What happens now when I put out poison?
The mound moves. About two feet from its original location. Obviously, the queen no
longer dies.
No, before anything is eaten by the queen, it is tested by an ant with a job that is
not enviable. In this, the ants are only a few thousand years behind humans. We have all
seen the movies where one poor fellow's job is to test the food before the king eats it.
Normally, I suppose, this is a really cushy job. The food-taster gets to at least sample
all of the wonderful food prepared specially for the King.
Why he would have accepted this position is beyond me. Did they tell him that the king
has no enemies, and so it is a great job? Didn't he think to ask why, if the king had no
enemies, the position existed in the first place?
This leads us to discuss the intelligence of fire ants related to each other. Every
time you put out ant poison, only to find that the mound has moved overnight, you know
that one single, solitary, very gullible ant has died. And you can take comfort in the
fact that the $10.00 or so that you spent on poison was well spent, since one-by-one you
are eliminating the gullible ants from the fire-ant specie, thus weeding out the unfit
ants, and improving their overall intelligence so that they will be better prepared for
the next method the humans invent for totally and completely eradicating them.
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