T Stout

Hi Ron,

It most likely was not the tawny crazy ant. In a natural setting, they have been documented to reach 15 to 20 billion ants per acre. This can be confirmed on the internet. They will easily forage up to 1/4 mile for food and have been known to go up to 1/2 mile under the proper conditions. They form supercolonies, with all of the ants working together and not fighting each other. Any one location can have the ants from about 100 acres converge on it under the right circumstances. That could be as many as 2 trillion ants if you are surrounded by a natural environment. It would take an awful lot of grits to kill this many ants. Those who have seen a full blown infestation first hand compare it to a 1950s horror film. It is that bad. The problem is not killing the first wave. The problem is their sheer numbers and their alarm pheromones. For every one you kill, 5 to ten come to take its place.

The tawny crazy ant goes by a completely different set of rules than any other ant. Hopefully, neither you nor your aunt live in an area where they do.

Thanks for the good word. The sheer volume of the mass is staggering and intimidating. This was an exception, infestations are not normally this bad. However, typical quantities can still be intimidating.

Those who have never seen an infestation of tawny/Rasberry crazy ants have no idea what one is like. They form super colonies. Instead of each nest having its own guarded territory, effectively all of the ants recognize each other as sisters and work together. They can forage up to 1/4 to 1/2 mile for food. That means that every ant within a 1/4 to 1/2 mile radius can potentially converge on a given location. They are dense, typically over 100 times the concentration of typical ant species. They are aggressive combatants. You kill one, it releases alarm pheromones and ten take its place. Kill a thousand, ten thousand take their place. Kill a million, ten million take their place. This is just like a 1950s horror movie, except it is real.

To get a picture of what they can be like, here are a couple of video links:

1. http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/infested/videos/hairy-crazy-ant.htm is a documentary on Animal Planet of an infestation so bad that people walked away from their home in Mississippi because the problems were so severe and no effective treatments were available. The ants obsession with eating electrical insulation made staying in their home unsafe because of the potential of an electrical fire. Finally, they simple walked away from their home. This was after consulting with the leading ant specialist from Mississippi State University, who made/presented the documentary.

2. documents a site in Tampa, Florida, that had piles and piles and piles of dead crazy ants all around the perimeter of their house. The accumulation shown was less than a week old. Sweeping these things up is a daily task and a nightmare. The treatment didn't slow them down. This video needs to be seen to be believed. More YouTube files show similar situations.

3. Tom Rasberry, who discovered the ants in Texas in 2002, talks about an experimental treatment on a 1/2 acre site near Houston, Texas, where he applied a particular insecticide and came back several months later. He found entire site was covered with a 2 inch thick layer of ants, a mixture of dead ants and living ants. This is 7,000 cubic feet of ant accumulation in 3 months on 1/2 acre. There were special circumstances, and most of the ants had probably traveled a long distance to come to the site. But, a few chickens or mushrooms or anteaters will not impact this kind of infestation. Again, until a person has seen an infestation like this in full bore, he has no comprehension of the problem. Unfortunately, this is reality and not horror fiction.

4. In Austin, Texas, I dropped a hot dog on the ground in an infested area and in less than 10 minutes there were six different established ant trails coming to it from different directions. These were all from different nests surrounding the hot dog.

Needless to say, property values can drop drastically for a site with a severe infestation.

I have some patents pending on various ways of using electrical/mechanical means of killing tawny crazy ants. There are unique characteristics of this particular kind of ant that I depend on. It sounds like you might have them. Check videos on YouTube and compare what you have with the videos. If you can associate them with specific ant hills, they are probably NOT tawny crazy ants.

I am looking for people with currently ACTIVE infestations to help me test some prototypes. I live near Dallas, we do not have infestations here but south of us, near Houston, is where they were first noticed. It has been so cold this winter that they are not active there currently.

The equipment is powered by electricity. In time, it should be driven by a solar collector, but currently it needs to be plugged in to an electrical outlet. You want it installed as far from your house as possible, because you want to divert ants FROM your house, not attract them to it. This means having a willingness to put up with electrical chords across your yard. This should be small price to pay for someone with a serious infestation.

I am still in an R & D stage. Preliminary testing last Fall looked very promising, but I was in the middle of a test when a cold snap hit the Houston area last December 5 and it has not been warm enough since then for them to be active.

The goal is to attract them to an extermination chamber and kill them in the chamber. The intent is to divert them from a house/yard. It is not known how effective this will be, but it should at least reduce the number at the house. Hopefully, emptying the chamber will be a lot simpler than trying to sweep up killed ants.

At this point, I can only handle a very few test sites. If you are interested in potentially working with me, I may be e-mailed at tim.stout.100@gmail.com .