Almost like a bad sci-fi movie!!

The USDA is working on bringing in a species of fly that attacks fire ants, lays eggs in the ants' heads and then the larvae grow inside the fire ants before hatching out of the ant to go crazy and flip out and start killing fire ants in acts of wanton destruction and breathtaking violence!!

Here are some cool movies online showing the process:

[url]http://www.ars.usda.gov/fireant/[/url]

The first movie on that page shows the flies attacking the ants and inserting eggs into the ants' heads.  But the ants get pissed off and grab one poor fly out of the air and rip it limb from limb!!  Nature is so brutal.

Watching these movies is almost as much fun as burning the little fuckers with a magnifying glass in the hot Texas sun!

On one trip down South, I was warned to watch out for the fire ants.  "Yeah right." I said as I walked around barefooted.  Well, one ant bit was all it took for me to start being MUCH more careful!  Not to mention they are probably gun-grabbing commies, otherwise why would they be red???  I hope they all die painfully!

-Nick Viejo.

The soundtracks to those clips prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the USDA is one government agency that has some workers who have a good sense of humor!

A surprisingly enjoyable presentation.


But it makes you wonder...how small is the smallest flying insect?    Nature's wonders never cease!


CJ

I too was worrying about this but didn't post my worries originally because you people would think I was unbalanced, but obviously if I'm not the only one...

All it would take is ONE fire ant colony near the nuclear power plant and one of those flies to mutate and grow to giant proportions and we would have a whole other infestation to worry about...man eating giant flies!  You southerners can keep the little beasts!

I'm with DoubleFeed on this one. Remember how the Africanized Bees turned out.

These little brain-eaters are being carefully investigated to make sure that there ARE no negative consequences to their introduction.   Enough environmental mistakes along these lines have been made that now such things are done with care.

Here in Florida, we suffer from two love bug seasons a year.   Love bugs are an introduced species of flying insect that were SUPPOSED to eat mosquitoes.   As things turned out, love bugs haven't the slightest interest in eating mosquitoes.  But their bodily fluids will eat the paint off your car if you don't wash their smashed bodies off fairly quickly.    And on top of that, NOTHING eats love bugs, which are apparently so nasty tasting that no bird with a memory will eat two of them.   So they have no naturally occurring predators here except for the fronts of cars.

Oh...and they're prolific as hell!  Once their season starts, the usual way to find them is in pairs, joined at the crotch, end to end.  They fly around that way and usually die in that configuration when they splatter on your car.

They swarm in huge numbers.  And perhaps worst of all, they're attracted to hotter areas, so they can be found in the greatest numbers swarming over roadways,  which is where they cause the most inconvenience.     A thick swarm of them can   cake your car's windshield in bug guts within a matter of seconds if you're driving through it, making powerful, good condition wiper blades on your car mandatory.  And your washer fluid bottle needs to be full and contain a stronger than usual strength washer fluid.



I'm not kidding about ANY of this.


CJ

Just don't let those love bugs get near the nuclear power plants.  There's no telling what might happen!

Love bugs don't just live in florida!

"Love bugs don't just live in Florida!"

Yeah, I know.  But I doubt that most of the nation has seen them firsthand.  They're sort of a southern tradition.   Like fire ants, incidentally.

And further south in Florida, there's some sort of Japanese tree snail that's supposed to be doing a lot of harm to the vegetation,  and then there's the invasion of Cuban Anoles, a type of adaptable brown lizard that dominates and has driven the green native lizards to the point that they're relatively rare,   and the mourning doves are facing a lot of competition from the descendants of escaped pet Ringneck doves (an African species), and many waterways are choked with Hydrilla weed,  which also isn't native, and so on and so forth.

The south seems to have more than its fair share of immigrants, and only a few of them are human!

CJ

No kidding about the nuke plant stuff. Remember on SNL (late 70s) when Prez. Jimmy Carter and the black female nuke plant janitor hooked-up.  

Hey, man it was real. I say it on TV.

Dave S