Valley Sounds the Alarm for Fire Ants--but Only One Has Been Found

The imported red fire ant has landed in the San Fernando Valley, prompting state officials to buy local newspaper ads urging residents to call authorities--and not take matters into their own hands--if they spot 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 victim and using its stinger.

Don’t panic yet, though. So far, the total number of fire 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 advertisements--timed to coincide with hot weather, which brings out the ants--are based on a state report listing places where the biting and stinging ants were spotted last year. Butthe report never mentioned that only one 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.”

State officials can’t tell parents where the Valley’s 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 such infested areas as Orange County, Cooper said. The worker, whose name was not disclosed, said he had found the ant in a mound alongside a house in Van Nuys.

When inspectors went to the address to follow up, they could not find that mound--or any others.

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

When red imported fire ants are found in large enough numbers to produce a swarm, they can be a serious problem. Their bites and stings usually result in painful blisters. In extremely rare cases, they can be fatal if they trigger an allergic reaction.

Much more aggressive than more common types of red ants, they attack with little warning.

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

Inspectors from the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commission plan to do their own search in coming months, using small bait baskets.

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

The bait 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 the 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 fire ants were first seen in the fall of 1998 in the Trabuco Canyon area of Orange County, north of Rancho Santa Margarita.

In February 1999, 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 ants, formally known as Solenopis invicta, were given their 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 three feet wide and 18 inches high.