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."

Happens all the time Mexico

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm? Is this news? My friends living on an island near Cancun, Mexico have this problem all the time... for years...

Voids Warranty?

[SpinningCone]

i used to work for a satellite TV company and insect infestation is was specifically mentioned under the "acts of God" portion of the warranty (more specifically as not covered under said warranty).

in training there were a few tales floating around of people calling in with their receiver boxes killed by ants.

Serious Problem

[spikedvodka]

It's a serious problem... Ant are warm blooded, and are going to like heat... Electronics produce heat (as do Air Conditioning units)

Given the number of Data Centers we have, I'm surprised that we haven't seen more problems like this where bugs (the little six-legged variety) cause more problems.

I do foresee a new booming speciality - Electronics-safe pest control (think Halon vs. Water for fire suppression, except for insects)

Leiningen versus the Ants

[Iamthecheese]

For your entertainment [classicshorts.com]

Happened to me

[naz404]

I live in the tropics, and for some bizarre reason, this colony of red ants that have taken residence at our place have started making beelines for my PCs

At one point I was wondering why some keys in my keyboard stopped responding when I found the damn ants had eaten the rubber linings under the keys!

I've now had to resort to drawing circles of protection around my electronics with insecticide chalk to keep the damn critters out...

WotW

[Fuzzums]

The chances of anything coming from earth..

And our flying monsters will be destroyed by something as small as an ant eating it's way through yet an other o-ring :(

Phase IV? Anyone?

[stirz]

This 1970s sci-fi movie immediately came to my mind: Phase IV [imdb.com]. In this movie, some scientist study ants which collaborate to spread in a desert-like area and also start to sabotage the science-lab short-cirtuiting computers and AC.

scary thing that those creatures really exist :-)

Re:Undocumented insects

[Dekortage]

Did anyone else read where these ants kill fire ants?

Yeah, and "the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken." So while I am all for eliminating fire ants, maybe not at the expense of ladybugs and endangered animals? (well, ok, it's just a prairie chicken)

I liked this part the best: "And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide." We're in trouble now.

I had these in my apartment.

[dino2gnt]

In 2002 or 2003 while living in Pasadena, my roommate and I were cleaning, and tried to move our N64 from the floor to a shelf. Under it, we found a brown mass which turned out to me a massive clump of these ants. We hosed them in insecticide, cleaned up the mess, and figured it was just a freak occurrence. A few days later I found a similar clump completely engulfing the powerhead on a small tank of cichlids. Being that cichlids will eat anything, I used a water bottle and hosed them all into the tank to be devoured. I had to replace the powerhead afterwards, and the N64 never worked right again.

The complex wrote it off as a side-effect of the recent heavy rain, and did nothing.

Doesn't require special ants

[Anonymous Coward]

I encountered HVAC control systems in the midwest US 10-20 years ago which failed because the enclosure was packed w/ dead ants. Never understood why, but fortunately just cleaning them out fixed the problem.

Re:Happened to me

[mikael]

Probably the sweet smell given off by the sealant used to prevent circuit boards from rusting, if not the components themselves (capacitors, coils etc..)

Even a rinsed out soft drinks can has enough sugar to attract ants.

As long as they only eat your computer...

[boombasticman]

In southern india someone stored all his earnings in the form of paper for his later retirement into a bank vault.

After some years time he looked into his box to see only some pieces left and some bugs which ate his money. The bank vault was not completly tight and the warm humid weather did it's part in this sad drama, too.

The bank could not be held liable, because it warned its customers of the bug problem long ago. And even when they were liable, they only would have to pay his money for the rent of his box, which is not much rupies instead of his financial damage.

Morale of the story: Don't think something lasts forever. Your DVD's are due in about 15 years time. HD and Blueray much shorter, so don't store your money on it.

Re:Everytime something like this happens...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ants have been the most successful lifeform on the planet for a long time. Take a look at the Wikipedia article. [wikipedia.org]

"they may constitute up to 15 to 25% of the total terrestrial animal biomass"

"56% of the genera represented on the Baltic amber fossils (early Oligocene), and 96% of the genera represented in the Dominican amber fossils (apparently early Miocene) still survive today"

You are only alive because ants don't view you as a threat.

Re:First computer bug

[Rie Beam]

"It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise--this thing gives out and [it is] then that 'Bugs'--as such little faults and difficulties are called--show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached."

-- Edison

It's the insulation, I think.

[Hasai]

For some reason, certain species of ants consider wiring insulation delicious, which can lead to some interesting situations.

Once when I was down in Panama, a swarm of ants got into a street-side power junction box that supplied industrial-class juice to three huge aircraft hangars. The cute little buggers immediate set themselves to devouring all the insulation off of the main power feeds, and when those arm-thick bundles of now-bare copper came into contact. . . .

BOOM!

The nearest hangar was five stories tall. The shredded remains of that junction box landed on the roof. And I swear it rained ants for the next half hour....
:\

Re:Happened to me

[consonant]

Ditto. When I lived in Chennai in India, my laptop would get ant swarms all around. And when did I realize I had lost some of my keys? When I tried to log in, and the OS wouldn't accept my password, 'cos of course, a key wasn't working. Walked over to a neighbour's system, looked up keycode for the 'h' key, walked back and logged in. I got lucky though - the keys for the keycode were not affected by the ants! (FWIW, a ThinkPad service centre promptly replaced the affected keys, blinking a bit at the bizarre story. Evidently, ants do NOT void your warranty :-D)

Re:Happens all the time Mexico

[griffjon]

Meh, they eat fire ants; so they're not all bad. If you're lucky enough to live far enough north not to know what a fire ant is, well... good.

Old news and other incidents (even photos.).

[antdude]

This has been known for many years. Here are more taken from my personal ant Web site:

Ants in yer... [synaptic.bc.ca] Pants? NOT! (Toshiba [toshiba.com] notebook/laptop); Ants Invade Apple iBook [slashdot.org].

Ants In [yahoo.com]
My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! [yahoo.com] account is required).

Ants in Omniview switchboxes [slashdot.org]: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox. Thanks nTrFace.

Argentine ants invade a network hub [blogspot.com].

Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive: Ontrack [ontrackdatarecovery.com]
and Computerworld [computerworld.com]
(seen on /. [slashdot.org]).

A photograph [flickr.com] showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his DSL connection and phone system.

Re:Happens all the time Mexico

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, I'm torn on the issue. After all, anything that kills fire ants is good in my book. But is the cure worse than the disease? They don't have stingers, but they do bite. And they are fast, swarm by the billions, foul electronics and machinery, and are resistant to normal OTC pesticides. Instead of killing the other ants which are the food of the horny toad, it kills ladybugs and endangered birds.

Fire ants are endemic and cause lots of problems, but they can be somewhat controlled. Who knows how far these ants will get out of control before we find effective means to fight them?

In the end, I think I'm going to have to call this a "bad thing", with the fire-ant-eating part the "silver lining".

Re:First computer bug

[Lijemo]

Then what makes them female?

They are "not male". But that doesn't automatically make them female. By evolutionary design, no worker ant ever reproduces. To me, that says genderless. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong, if you can explain to me what it is that makes them allegedly "female".

Re:Happened to me

[jchernia]

That Terro stuff is great, you watch them gorge on it and a week later they are gone (works for Argentine Ant that we have in California). Unfortunately I read that Terro doesn't work on these ants.

I wonder who would win an ant war between Argentine Ants and these - I've read that they have yet to find an ant that reliably wins against the Argentine ant.

Re:Thanks Rachel

[Dekortage]

Let's quote Carson herself: "No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored.... Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ... Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible."

Doesn't sound like she wanted to eliminate DDT, does it? Rather, she wanted its use scaled back from what she saw as excessive.

Re:Happens all the time Mexico

[Z34107]

I may be a retard, but why call me "fucking" retard?

If he called you a "fucking" retard on Slashdot, it was probably meant as a complement. ^.^

Besides: American website. Texas interest story.