May 07, 2007

Please, Let It Be True

After getting 40-50 bites on each foot and leg one afternoon last summer, IÂ’m counting on seeing an end to this scourge in my lifetime.

Imported red fire ants have plagued farmers, ranchers and others for decades. Now the reviled pests are facing a bug of their own.

Researchers have pinpointed a naturally occurring virus that kills the ants, which arrived in the U.S. in the 1930s and now cause $6 billion in damage annually nationwide, including about $1.2 billion in Texas.

The virus caught the attention of U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers in Florida in 2002. The agency is now seeking commercial partners to develop the virus into a pesticide to control fire ants.

The virus was found in about 20 percent of fire ant fields, where it appears to cause the slow death of infected colonies..

Kill them. Kill them all.

Posted by: Greg at 11:00 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 153 words, total size 1 kb.

1

Instead of the familiar commercial where you see the bugs react once they realize that a particular insect spray had been used, "RAID!" and they all flop over with little plus signs on their eyes; now, with any luck we will see a mound of fire ants, the little red guys wandering around sneezing and hacking up slime, "Is there a Doctor in the house".   


Posted by: T F Stern at Tue May 8 01:10:23 2007 (/XKHe)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
5kb generated in CPU 0.0052, elapsed 0.0144 seconds.
21 queries taking 0.0109 seconds, 30 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
[/posts]