Swarming Ants Destroy Electronics in Texas

AntOverlords writes "Voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers. They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet."

First computer bug

[adpsimpson]

Interestingly, the first ever computer bug was also of the 'physical' variety - See here [jamesshuggins.com]

Not that uncommon.

[Thornae]

My company often has ant trouble with electronic equipment installed in the far North of Queensland, in Australia.
Unless boxes are very tightly sealed, they'll get into the electronics and destroy them - usually by creating shorts or damaging PCB tracks.

We've had a few boards sent back that reeked so strongly of ants that you could smell it through the packaging. Generally, they're too damaged to be worth repairing.

Anecdotally, I've heard of a number of other companies having similar problems with installations in tropical areas. I'm not sure if it's a problem specific to electronics, or if it's just a case of the ants getting into everything, and the electronics being particularly vulnerable.

Re:Serious Problem

[jellomizer]

Cold Blooded animals tend to be attracted to heat. Warm Blooded animals produce their own.

Paratrechina sp. nr. pubens more details

[Peter Simpson]

Texas A&M page on the ants:
http://urbanentomology.tamu.edu/ants/exotic_tx.cfm [tamu.edu]

Re:First computer bug

[karbonKid]

No, it wasn't [askoxford.com].

Re:First computer bug

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Interestingly, the first ever computer bug was also of the 'physical' variety - See here [jamesshuggins.com]

From the article you link to:

So, where did the term "bug" come from?

Well, the entry ("First actual case of bug being found.") shows that the term was already in use before the moth was discovered. Grace Hopper also reported that the term "bug" was used to describe problems in radar electronics during WWII [emph mine]

Re:Happened to me

[ortholattice]

I don't know about red ants, but for the big black (carpenter?) ants invading my kitchen, the Terro liquid, which I think is just a sugar solution with 5% borax - you could probably make it yourself, but why bother - was a miracle. I had this problem for many years every spring and summer, and those Raid-type plastic "ant traps" that I put all over the place seemed to have no effect at all.

I put a large drop of this stuff on a piece of cardboard and left it on in a corner of the kitchen counter. Within a day, the ants formed a crowded circle around the drop voraciously drinking it up to the point that their bellies swelled up, with a long line of ants going to wherever under the sink they came from. Over several days they went through a third of a small bottle of the stuff! You could see a few apparently coming back for seconds, weak and shaky. Then they were suddenly gone, totally and completely. This was 2 years ago, and they've never come back.

The Terro bottle says it's for "sweet-eating ants" - I thought all ants loved sweets, so I don't know what that means.

Re:Serious Problem

[jellomizer]

+5 Informative on this post... Come on it is just a minor correction, coming from a slip in words. Oh lets highly moderate simple corrections at the expense of actually good topic. Man you guys are so anial to think my above post is worth that much.

Peace Corps Volunteer

[QuantumAbyss]

I was working in The Gambia none too long ago. We'd have ant problems there too - they'd eat UPSs, network cables, etc. Real pain. The best way to deal with them when we could was to put the swarmed device out in the sun. For whatever reason they didn't like that. I don't know if this is the same variety of ant, but it might work...

Re:Serious Problem

[jellomizer]

Easy. It is all part of Quantum computing. With Quantum computing they work best when turned off so... All we need to do is have a bunch of Quantum computer processing a large amounts of data without returning any input. thus they will all run cool

Re:Happened to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Some ants like to eat grease and will ignore sweets. For these ants, I mix the Terro liquid with peanut butter or butter (they love butter). The borax works like tiny pieces of glass that tear the ant bodies apart from the inside. Eventually the queen is fed the borax and the colony dies.

Re:Not that uncommon.

[Agripa]

As a matter of interest, what do ants smell like?

They smell like formic acid if you get enough of them.

Article Corrections

[mattOzan]

The author of this article misspelled the name of the ant. I tried Googling "paratrenicha species near pubens" and came up only with results pointing back to this one article.

Correctly spelled, the ant's name is "Paratrechina sp. nr. pubens." It has not yet been identified to the species level, hence the "species near" bit.

Also, what's with this sentence?

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

No insect bites with a stinger. It's two different ends, folks! I frequently hear someone yelp, "That bee just bit me!" No, she stung you. Honeybees don't even have chewing mouthparts capable of biting--they just suck nectar with a siphon-like structure.

Fun Fact: Only female insects sting, since a stinger is actually a modified ovipositor. Thankfully, mammals like our ladies haven't yet evolved venomous uses for their reproductive parts.

Re:Everytime something like this happens...

[gd2shoe]

In fact right now the honeybee is quickly going from high population to endangered, and there's still no explanation why.
...
...it's very clear that they are NOT more adaptive. rather, they have simply filled a niche by nature, and are no longer there (or will be soon) since the niche is gone.

Whoa there! Talk about leaping to conclusions. That niche is there greater than ever, and encouraged by our agricultural industry. There are myriad other possible explanations, but their niche collapsing isn't one of them!

Re:different... ummmm, not pick a fight...

[JetScootr]

But the pics shown for paratrechina are the ant I was talking about. around here, we call'em 'sugar ants', not cuz they eat sugar or cuz that's the "official" name, but cuzza they way they run around like crazy. It's a name coincidence, cuz most people aren't bugologists, so they just come up with "unapproved names". After awhile, that's what everyone in the area calls'em. What they are now calling the "crazy ant", including the pics and descriptions on the site you linked, are (uh, WERE is more likely now) called 'sugar ants'. Sorry for the confusion. The paratrechina as shown and described in the news has been around Houston for many many years longer than the news reports claim.

Re:First computer bug

[SeaDuck79]

A queen bee is just a worker that is fed royal jelly, which is what allows her to reproduce. If the queen dies, another is chosen from among the workers.

From an ant expert (not me)...

[antdude]

http://antfarm.yuku.com/topic/7013/master/1/ [yuku.com]

"Worker ants are female because they are genetically female (with different details, but along the lines of human with two X-chromosomes per cell being female, vs those with an X and a Y being male). Worker ants also have at least vestigial ovaries and stings, which are female reproductive and modified egg-laying organs, respectively.

Also, not all worker ants are non-reproductive. Many can lay eggs that give rise to males, most often when they are away from the influence of the queen. In some ant species, the workers and queens are not, or barely, morphologically distinguishable. Finally, in a small number of ant species that do have distinct queen and worker body types, there is evidence that workers can lay eggs that give rise to other workers..."

Re:First computer bug

[Lijemo]

I thought it was the drones that could only mate once, but the queen bees weren't under that restriction? Or am I getting that mixed up with some other insect?

(as an aside, speaking of only mating once: I remember reading that the female preying-mantis eating her mate's head thing was debunked: it turns out the researcher who discovered the phenomena was was keeping his mantises in starvation conditions. Apparently, when they are not starving to death, they don't resort to cannibalism.)