King Of The Anthill

Meet the crazy ant:

Researchers recently discovered that crazy ants have a natural defense against the venom of fire ants:

When a crazy ant is sprayed with venom from the abdomen of a fire ant, the crazy ant secretes formic acid from its own abdomen, takes the secretion in its mouth, and smears it over its body. According to Furturity, exposed crazy ants that were allowed to detoxify themselves had a 98 percent survival rate in lab experiments. When [researcher Edward] LeBrun and his team sealed up the crazy ants’ abdominal glands with nail polish, the number of survivors dropped to below half. On the battlefield, this makes the crazy ants impervious to the weapons of the fire ant.

Kate Shaw Yoshida has more on the evolutionary arms race between the species:

While this rare ability confers a huge advantage for crazy ant survival, its biggest implications are ecological.

Ever since fire ants were imported into the southern US in the 1930s, they have been the dominant ant species in most grassland ecosystems. But crazy ants—introduced only about 12 years ago—are now taking over, thanks in part to their ability to detoxify fire ant venom. When the two species fight over food or space, crazy ants come out on top 93 percent of the time.

Digging into these two species’ past sheds light on this asymmetry. Tawny crazy ants and red imported fire ants share an evolutionary history since their native ranges overlap in parts of South America. Their arms race began there, with fire ants evolving venom to defend themselves and crazy ants evolving a detoxification mechanism as a counter-defense. Now the chemical warfare has been re-engaged here on a second continent, playing out across the Gulf Coast. And for a second time in the past century, a new invasive ant species is dominating and drastically transforming ecological communities.

George Dvorsky calls crazy ants “a total headache”:

As they make their way north at a rate of 600 feet a year, they’re wreaking havoc on populations of insects, spiders, centipedes and crustaceans. This is likely to cause deleterious effects on various ecosystems. They can’t be stopped with conventional pesticide, they’ve been known to disable a huge industrial plant, and they frequently short out electrical equipment.