Crazy Raspberry Ants Attack!

Crazy raspberry ants are on the march in Texas, and they are raising havoc with electronics and computers and anything else they can get into.

I am not making this up:

Billions of electronic-eating ‘crazy rasberry ants’ invade Texas
It sounds like the plot of a farfetched science fiction movie. Unfortunately for the residents of Texas, it is very much a reality: billions of tiny reddish-brown ants have arrived onshore from a cargo ship and are hell-bent on eating anything electronic.

Computers, burglar alarm systems, gas and electricity meters, iPods, telephone exchanges – all are considered food by the flea-sized ants, for reasons that have left scientists baffled.

Crazy is the the right word. The ants are known as “crazy rasberry ants”: crazy because they seem to move in a random scrum as opposed to marching in regimented lines, and rasberry after a pioneering exterminator, Tom Rasberry, who first identified them as a problem.

I first heard of crazy raspberry ants last night at Blue Sky Mines when one of our field techs called in and said that a particular reporting station on a pipeline in south Texas was out of order temporarily because of ants- so many had crawled into an enclosed electronics unit that they had caused an electric arc which knocked out a piece of communications equipment. I have heard of animals occasionally damaging equipment: a cow chews on a phone line, squrrel gets into a fuse box, that sort of thing- but never had I heard of ‘crazy raspberry ants’. I thought it would make a good name for a rock band until I googled it, and lo and behold: the ants are for real. I even found a picture.

Crazy raspberry ants. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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