Could this be a breakthrough in the fight against fire ants?

They may be tiny, but Argentine ants can kick some ant butt. This invasive species (http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/igviewer.php?imgid=21&gid=4&index=0) has nearly wiped out native ants (http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060821_ant_jaws.html) in California.
Now scientists have discovered a way to turn one of the ants' strongest weapons into a weakness. By altering the identifying chemicals coating the ants' bodies, researchers turned typical cooperative behavior into an ant-family feud.
Like most ants, the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) relies on chemical tags (http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060508_mm_ants_rule.html) to identify friend or foe. The chemicals are waxy and can't evaporate into the air like other animal communication (http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/051101_mice_sing.html) chemicals called pheromones. The ants must make physical contact to smell them.

Read on ... (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14840799/)

I hope the Fire Ant formula is discovered before next summer.

No great loss if they go extinct.

Thats amazing!!!

I wonder if they'll try to harness them in the military.

that'd scare people, no one would mess with us because we would have ANT POWER.

I don't know about you, but I would be freaked out if they could control millions of fireants to come into my house and attack me.

Think about it; you're just about to go to sleep in bed, when you notice a bunch of little bugs crawling all over the sheets. And then they start biting you all over.

That actually reminds me of about 50 cheezy horror movies

Maybe they can do that to Moslem terrorists. Oh, wait. They're already killing each other.

Instead of using explosives, what you're suggesting is to inundate an area with phemerones that are engineered to adhere to humans that attract insects & cause those insects to consume what they're attracted to?

Sort of like making the curse "...may the fleas from 1000 camels take up residence in your genital region ..." come true?

that would be a terrible way to die. your body would be at the morgue.
cod? eaten by ants

Very interesting!!

that would be a terrible way to die. your body would be at the morgue.
cod? eaten by ants

Heh, if we just used those phemerones once on some terrorists' groin, I bet a lot of terrorists might rethink their ways. Millions of ants crawling up his pants :thumbs: I bet a lot of people would get a phobia of ants after that.

Wasn't that an old-fashioned torture in the days of the west? Bury some guy and leave only his head above ground covered in honey?

Or was that some old movie joke?

It looked horrendous anyway, enough to fire up my young imagination.

Now that's innovative torture - maybe we'll start encorporating that in with the Red Hot Chili Peppers thing

Now that's innovative torture - maybe we'll start encorporating that in with the Red Hot Chili Peppers thing

yeah, I wonder if they really did it... even just the honey drying on your head in the hot sun would send me over the edge...

Fucking christ could we have one thread without mulsim bashing? or bringing up terrorism?

Yes I'm sure frogger will say "but I was talking bad about Muslim terrorists" so then you think White, black, jewish, argintinian, russian etc terrorists are fine?

Wasn't that an old-fashioned torture in the days of the west? Bury some guy and leave only his head above ground covered in honey?

Or was that some old movie joke?

It looked horrendous anyway, enough to fire up my young imagination.

I've heard that the Japanese used to do that in the jungle to captured Marines back in WWII :(

I've heard that the Japanese used to do that in the jungle to captured Marines back in WWII :(

When I searched it, some site wants to kill Barney the dinosaur that way...hehe

I have no problem with ants. Live and let live; they're here for a purpose.
(Of course, we live nowhere near fire-ant territory so I can say that.)

Have they tried natural predators?
Surely there are some.

This other sounds like it COULD have a backlash.......


http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/1918/themposterc10126115sp1.jpg

According to this website, there Is a natural predator of the fire ant--a tiny little fly.

http://www.landscapemanagement.net/landscape/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=279574


(lord, it's boring today at work.....)

OR, perhaps they could bring in crateloads of cobalt blue tarantulas and spiffy up the local landscape with this lovely blue specimen, and eliminate the pesky ants at the same time.


http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/2388/cobablufau6.jpg

wow...I've never seen a blue tarantula. they look amazing.

Thanks rendova! That just upped my arachnophobia by 1000%. That thing is so freaky looking, it's beautiful. I'll chance the fire ants.

Weren't killer bees supposed to have destroyed the planet by now? Somehow nature tends to react and take care of itself. Hopefully it will here too

Sorry guys--for some reason I find tarantulas horridly fascinating, and I'm even thinking about getting one as a pet.
The cobalt blue is considered a "tarantula with an attitude" and is only recommended for very experienced handlers as it's quite aggressive. But they're so beautiful!
Here's a cool website for big spider lovers:

http://www.tarantulas.com/gallery.asp

Check out this one--the world's biggest spider ( but rather gentle , really)--a person would have NO problem with thieves coming in with this critter about:

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/6726/goliathjs1.jpg



(And we've gone from ants to spiders, lol)

I recommend them as pets. I've had 3 or 4 as such. Unfortunatly my last one died because my damn cat somehow figured out how to open the cage (despite the fact that the cat would have to be standing on top of teh cage to reach it. Still baffles me). Anyway the cat tortured it all night and I found it bruised and battered in the morning. It lived for a few more days and seemed to be getting better. Then it just up and died.

My other two from when I was a kid either died from a wasp or poisoned crickets. They died within days of each other and did not desicate. You got to be careful where you get crickets to feed them from. If the crickets hae pesticide on them it can kill your spider. i normally get crickets from water meters (you know the holes with metal lids along sidewalks) but apparently even they can be sprayed.

Thanks for the tips, guerilla--we'll be sure to keep our cats away from our new critter.
We are inexperienced keepers--can you recommend a good breed for beginners?

Thanks for the tips, guerilla--we'll be sure to keep our cats away from our new critter.
We are inexperienced keepers--can you recommend a good breed for beginners?
IF you do this, I want to hear every lurid detail... I could faint just thinking about something that large, that poisonous and deadly and that pretty in the same abode...

Details...I want ALL the creepy details! I thought my girlfriend was nuts when she got a rat for her kid...now I think of it more as a kitty with a naked tail!:woohoo:

LOL, what can I say, Sal?
Mom's a wierdo.

My son wants one--he's in middle school and it's all the rage to have these critters as pets annymore.
His friend has one named Mary that is so tame, it actually raises one hairy leg after the other to be combed, and is pampered and spoiled.Their whole family is fond of Mary. AND, in a neighborhood with several breakins recently, theirs is the only house that has been untouched!

PS. I have a lifelong fear of spiders. They say you need to face your fear...what better way?:)

I remember seeing the movie, THEM in 1954 or 1955. It was at the height of the Atom Bomb scare and there were lots of movies dealing with atomic mutations. That was back when we had 'take cover' drills in school and kids were given dog tags to wear around their necks.

"Them!" was actually a pretty good movie.
It gets four stars by a lot of critics.
Ants the size of battleships---YES!!!!!

That movie scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.

I remember seeing the movie, THEM in 1954 or 1955. It was at the height of the Atom Bomb scare and there were lots of movies dealing with atomic mutations. That was back when we had 'take cover' drills in school and kids were given dog tags to wear around their necks.
================================

I remember the movie.
I believe that everything that could be imagined was made gigantic by radiation in those movies during that period of time.

I remember the old "get under your desk" drills during the early years of school. That seems so comical now, knowing the devastating power of nuclear weapons. Could be that the adults knew better, it was just to give us kids a feeling of security in an insecure world. :bombout:

Bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.

I recall those drills too.
They were a welcome diversion from actually having to do any work.
We also had tornado drills.
Once, we all lined up in front of a huge plate glass window!
Thankfully there was no real tornado that day.

Ours were held in a school that was usually downwind from (what was then) the 3rd largest steel plant in the US. Given the rates of weird cancers in western NY state, I can only thank my lucky stars that I had the good sense to leave there nearly 40 years ago.