Something Is Quietly Decapitating Fire Ants Across the South —Scientists Found The Enemy

Something Is Quietly Decapitating Fire Ants Across the South —Scientists Found The Enemy The red imported fire ant is the most successful invasive insect in North America. It arrived in Alabama in the 1930s with no predator, no parasite, and nothing that had ever kept it in check. Today it occupies roughly two-thirds of Texas, costs the state over a billion dollars a year, and has survived every chemical program thrown at it for the better part of a century. By the early 2000s, the honest scientific consensus was blunt: the fire ant had won. Then a citizen-science survey grid on the Edwards Plateau stopped agreeing with that. In specific limestone corridors, fire ant density had been falling for three straight seasons — no bait applied, no weather explanation, nothing that fit the usual pattern. When researchers went looking for what was actually happening on the ground, they found a breeding population of an animal most of Texas hadn't seen in forty years: the Texas horned lizard, the state reptile, once so common a generation of kids caught them in their own backyards. The strange part is that this lizard cannot eat a fire ant. Its entire hunting biology is built around a completely different prey species. What it's actually doing to beat back the fire ant has nothing to do with a fight at all — and once you see the mechanism, it changes how the whole invasion looks. SOURCES Imported Fire Ants — Texas A&M AgriLife Extension https://agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/li... Texas Horned Lizard — Texas Parks and Wildlife Department https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/... Texas Horned Lizard Watch — Texas Parks and Wildlife Department https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/... Fort Worth Zoo's Texas Horned Lizard Conservation Program https://www.fortworthzoo.org/conserva... Phorid Flies (Pseudacteon spp.) as Biological Control of Imported Fire Ants — Texas A&M AgriLife https://fireant.tamu.edu/biocontrol/p... Old Rip: The Legend of the Horned Toad — Eastland County Historical Commission https://www.eastlandcountytx.gov #fireants #lizard