Ant Discovered in Valley Has State Fired Up

The red imported fire ant has landed in the San Fernando Valley, causing state officials to take out newspaper ads urging residents to call authorities--and not take matters into their own hands--if they spot suspicious ant mounds.

“Disturb their mound and thousands of ants will attack!” the ads warn, along with a graphic depiction of an ant biting into the skin of a victim and using its stinger.

Don’t panic yet, though--so far the total number of the ants found in the Valley: one.

“When I authorized the campaign, I didn’t know they had only found one,” said Larry Cooper of the state Food and Agriculture Department.

The ad campaign--timed to coincide with the hot weather which brings out the ants--was based on a state report listing places where the biting and stinging ants were spotted last year. But the report never mentioned that only one ant had been found in the Valley, Cooper said.

No matter--Cooper thinks the warning is important, and the ads will run for the next six weeks as planned. “I wanted to raise awareness in case they start spreading,” he said. “We want to make sure parents don’t let their kids play around ant mounds.”

But state officials can’t tell parents where the one ant was found. They don’t know.

The ant was brought into a department laboratory in March 1999, by a temporary worker hired to take part in a search to determine if the dreaded ants had made their way into the Valley from nearby infested areas, including parts of Orange County, Cooper said. The worker, whose name was not disclosed by the department, said he had found the ant in a mound alongside a house in Van Nuys.

*

When inspectors went to the address to follow up in the wake of the positive identification of the red imported ant, they could not find that mound--or any others--on the property.

“It was his first day on the job,” Cooper said of the worker. “We think he wrote down the wrong address.”

The mound was never found, Cooper said.

The red imported fire ant, when found in large enough numbers to produce a swarm, can be a serious problem. Their bites and stings usually result in painful blisters, and in extremely rare cases when an allergic reaction is involved, can be fatal.

Inspectors from the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commission plan to do their own search in coming months by placing small bait baskets in selected areas to attract large quantities of ants that can be examined.

“We put the bait in little plastic baskets to protect it from birds,” explained Richard Iizuka, deputy director of the commission.

In keeping with the picnic-like theme, the bait inside the baskets will be Spam.

“We come back in an hour or so to see what ants the Spam has attracted,” Iizuka said.

Infestations of the ants have been especially serious in Texas and in southeastern states, where they have reportedly spread their mounds over more than 260 million acres, according to a state Department of Food and Agriculture report.

*

In Southern California, colonies of the red imported fire ant were first spotted in the fall of 1998 in the Trabuco Canyon area of Orange County, north of Rancho Santa Margarita. The ants originated in South America.

In February of last year, a quarantine was established in all of Orange County to prevent commercial shipments of plants, soil and baled hay to other parts of the state.

The ant, formally known as Solenopis invicta, was given its scientific name in 1972 by a scientist who chose invicta because the ant seemed almost invincible, according to information on the Department of Food and Agriculture’s Web site. The queen of a colony can produce 1,000 eggs per day, and the ants live in mounds that are up to 3 feet wide and 18 inches high.

Much more aggressive than more common types of red ants, they attack with little warning, grasping skin with jaws and stinging in a circular pattern.

For people not allergic to the stings and bites, the most serious outcome of an attack is secondary infections, according to the site. About 30 deaths from allergic reactions have been documented.