Thinking Big Against Tiny Foe

This week the state Senate is expected to approve $5 million to help agriculture officials do battle with the fire ant. That might sound like overkill in dealing with a quarter-inch insect, but entomologists who have fought a losing battle for four decades against the venomous critter say it won’t be nearly enough.

To no avail, they have hit the ants with everything from pesticides to burning gasoline. The voracious bugs arrived first in Alabama as stowaways on a ship from Brazil. They have spread over 309 million acres in 11 southern states and Puerto Rico, an area bigger than Texas and California combined. As Sanford Porter, who is coordinating the national eradication effort, puts it: “We spent $500 million in 1970s money and were never able to reverse their expansion. It was the Vietnam of American entomology.”

California officials now pondering how to spend their $5 million should take heed of Porter’s analogy. Most strategists agree that a key U.S. mistake in Vietnam was failing to understand the nature of the people on which the aerial destruction was falling. At a fire ant conference underway in South Carolina, entomologists are making a similar argument. Agriculture officials will fail, they say, if they attack pell-mell, dumping pesticide onto an enemy they don’t understand.

Ants are perhaps the most aggressive creatures on Earth. As the world’s preeminent ant expert, Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, has said, “If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.”

Ant experts--myrmecologists--say that California’s agriculture crops can be best protected if the state tries to cleverly seduce the ants rather than massively bombard them. An abatement plan might be developed if scientists were able to establish what foods appeal to them and what time of day they forage.

The sophisticated “biocontrol” tactics that myrmecologists are considering bear scant resemblance to the blanket bombing of Vietnam’s Rolling Thunder onslaught. One, for example, involves freezing a fire ant colony long enough to replace its queen with a renegade queen, which produces the essence of war--confusion. Another would introduce a woodland ant called Pheidole dentata, which can destroy fire ant colonies 100 times larger than its own by using battle strategies worthy of a Von Clausewitz.

Confronting the fire ant will call for unconventional warfare on a massive scale. You have to think big in assaulting an enemy that has never tasted defeat.