He told me that competing fire ant hills are very aggressive toward each other. He demonstrated this by scooping up a spade-full of the top of an ant hill. Fire ant hills are pretty shallow, so the spade full contained thousands of ants.....and he dropped it on another ant hill and then took a spade full of them and dropped it back on the first.
A huge "ant war" broke out immediately in both groups and they killed each other by the thousands.
Later that day, he went back and put fire ant poison on what was left of both hills to finish them off.
If you see an ant hill and think it may be fire ants, an easy way to tell without getting stung is to look at the size of the ants. If you have several, noticeably different sizes of ants in the same hill...they're probably fire ants. Or at least that's the way it always seems to work in here in Florida.
I don't see why you have to insult fire ants. They may not be the deepest critters on the planet but do they find the shallowest ant in the hill and put him in charge?