[SamAdams76]

Ants are pretty amazing. I was in Alabama last week and observed some of the fire ant mounds down there. If you have never seen fire ants, it is quite something to see. They build huge mounds that can measure 18 inches high and if you disturb it in any way, hundreds of them will attack. If you stick a twig in one, the fire ants will have the stick covered in seconds. If you really mess one up, the ants will swarm everywhere. Some of these mounds can contain several hundred thousand ants.

I will probably post an article about these fire ants another time. They already cover most of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas and are advancing northward at a rate of about 15 miles a year. Soon they will cover most of Tennessee and North Carolina. If they ever are able to adapt to colder climes, they could make it into most areas in the United States.

You don't want these things in your backyard. Unfortunately, they have changed life for the worse down in Alabama. When I was a child, you could play in the pastures and meadows of northern Alabama. Not anymore, it is too risky. You don't ever want to step in one of these mounds. You will be covered with hundreds of stings almost instantly.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Interesting. I saw something about this a few days ago, I don't remember where. Pretty wild.

[thatsnotnice]

Southeast Texas is one big fire ant colony. My wife always used to ask me why I move around all the time – why I never stand still. You would adopt a fidgety characteristic if you grew up on an anthill too.

I’ve seen grown men at a church picnic remove pants, shirts – the works – and head for the water hose because they stood still too long while talking.

They don’t get you right at first. They wait until you are pretty much covered, then attack at the same time. You would think you could feel them crawling on you before you were 60% covered, but it happens. I don’t know how they do it… It’s one of those deals where you look down and see an ant. Then you see another one. Then your eyes focus and you realize you are covered with ants. That only happens once or twice and you learn to move around a lot.

I always thought that in the overall scheme of things, chiggers were a bigger pain than fire ants.

[Bogey78O]

I remember a movie a few years back where ants learnt how to strategize. Needless to say they kicked our butts.

[hawkk]

Your post didn't say, but I take it these ants are a form of fire ants? Maybe a worse kind? I have lived in FL for the past 6 yrs, and have dealt with them on a day to day basis, winter included. The only thing I have found to help control them is to go after them a few times a day (they move once you've disturbed the colony), and believe it or not, instant grits REALLY do work!!

[Montfort]

Ant colony stretching thousands of miles through Western Europe?

It sounds like the European Community.

[Mr.Clark]

A few years back NOVA did a documentary on African Army ants. It was really unbelievable, they would just swarm over an area in an ant wave attack and pretty much kill and destroy anything in their path.

[Cvengr]

A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.

Oh yeah,....well down here in Texas we might not have a supercolony that long, but the fire ants get to be 3 feet long. We sic the jackalope on them to keep them out of the yard at night. ;^)

Seriously though, I don't think that simply because two different ant colonies fail to attack one another is sufficient to claim a super colony over 100s of kilometers. It might actually justify a characteristic of a type of ant in a particular region as not being natually combative to foreign colonies,...hence no super colony, just a French ant.

[Cvengr]

I wonder if articles such as this aren't simply some sort of Intel/counterintel encoded messages. I didn't recognize the Italian Rivera was 1000s of miles from Spain. It always seemed maybe several hundred miles away. What if the term ants was substituted for foreign bank accounts or securities, Operative names were similar and days seem like years. Who would ever question such technique?