Ants Go Marching
Five World War II bombers took off from a Florida airfield on Oct. 5, 1967 to bomb the American South. An article that ran that morning in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said that three B-17s and two PV-2s laden with 10,000 pounds of death-dealing cargo each would carry out their missions “with the City of Sarasota and eastern Manatee as their targets.”
While the bombers were certainly at war, they weren’t dropping explosives. Their enemy was a millimeters-long, brownish-red insect known to scientists as Solenopsis invicta, meaning “invincible ant,” and to lay people as the fire ant, aka “ants from hell” and “them devils.” The bombers were to unload mirex, a poison usually applied to grits, onto the critter.
By the late 1960s, the fire ant had been in the American South for more than 30 years. Southerners spoke of ruined crops, destroyed wildlife, and the ants’ fiery sting. How much damage the ants had actually caused was uncertain, but it was enough for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to declare war on the pest. During an 11-year campaign, more than 143 million pounds of mirex1 were dropped across 77,220 square miles of land from Texas to Florida, costing close to $200 million. The outcome? The ants nearly doubled their range. The mirex, which was later found to be a carcinogen, persisted in the environment for decades, accumulating in birds’ eggs, mammals’ milk, and human tissues. The world’s leading ant researcher, E.O. Wilson, dubbed the mirex program the “Vietnam of entomology.”
Today, if you draw a line from Virginia Beach to Nashville to Abilene in west Texas, you’ll find fire ants everywhere below it, as well as in Southern California. The ants’ annual impact on the economy, environment, and quality of life in the United States totals $6 billion, according to entomologists at Texas A&M University. In Texas alone they rack up $1.2 billion each year: $47 million at golf courses; $64 million at cemeteries (the ants love the open and slightly overgrown habitat around tombs); and as much as $255 million in the cattle industry. They cause other problems too. In Virginia Beach, 30-year-old former marine Bradley Johnson was stung by fire ants while working outside—and died of anaphylactic shock. On at least one occasion, fire ants invaded an elementary school in Tennessee to get candy stashed in kids’ lockers. At Greystone covered in fire ants, which were crawling from her mouth, nose, ears, and hair: The ants frequently enter nursing homes, attracted by crumbs left in residents’ beds. And scientists anticipate that the ants will keep expanding their range. Climate change and crossbreeding with species more tolerant of cold may enable them to settle farther north.
