There’s a Reason They Call Them ‘Crazy Ants’

Bill McCullough for The New York Times

The first time Mike the Hog-a-Nator noticed the ants, they were piled outside his cardiologist's office. This was two summers ago, in Pearland, a suburb of Houston. There was a forbidding, fibrous heap of dead ants on either side of the building's double doors, each a couple of feet long. And there were also legions of living ants shuffling over the dead ones — though Mike the Hog-a-Nator had to bend down to see these. Otherwise, so many individual ants were moving so chaotically, and so fast, that the entire reddish-brown tangle at his feet looked as if it were shimmering. Mike the Hog-a-Nator remembers thinking: What the world? Then he went inside for his weekly appointment.

Six years earlier, a doctor found a tumor on Mike the Hog-a-Nator's aorta. It was inoperable. Mike, who was only 36, was told to live every day as if it were his last. He narrowed his joys and priorities to two. The first was putting smiles on the faces of people who need them, so he started a program he calls Therapy Through the Outdoors. Ever since, he has been taking kids with terminal diseases and veterans with injuries or PTSD on adventures in the 60-acre woodland across from his house. The other was shooting as many feral hogs as he possibly could, which is what he and the sick kids and the wounded warriors often do in the woods.

Mike hates feral hogs, and has always found it very satisfying to clear those hideous, rooting thugs off a piece of land. He has always been good at it too — that's why people call him Mike the Hog-a-Nator. (His real name is Mike Foshee.) Recently, he even started marketing his own all-natural hog bait, "Pork Smack™ Hog Attractant," after months of refining the recipe. America has been filling up with invasive species since European settlers first arrived. Feral hogs, which were brought to the continent five centuries ago, are among the most gruesome and destructive. The federal government estimates that there are now five million hogs in 35 states, resulting in $1.5 billion in damages and control costs every year. In its literature, the Department of Agriculture calls the animals a "pandemic."

But anyway, the ants.

They arrived at Mike the Hog-a-Nator's house a few months after he first saw them at the cardiologist's office. One day his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from the vents in his living-room floor. So he powered up his Shop-Vac to clear them. By the time he was done, he'd sucked out five gallons of ants.

Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.

Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It's common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.

"They literally come in waves of just millions," Mike told me. (One Texas A&M entomologist confessed, "You figure these stories are laced with hyperbole, but when you get in there, it's unreal.") People don't want to visit the Foshees anymore, and if they do, they leave quickly, before the ants can stow away in their cars and accompany them home. This summer, Mike had to cancel Therapy Through the Outdoors. Recently, he and his wife were sitting outside, watching a pair of bald eagles settle into a pecan tree for the evening, when Mike looked down and saw one of his bare feet overtaken by ants. He remembers thinking, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, running inside and running back out with his AR-15, the assault rifle he uses to take out hogs. He was about to open fire on the ants until his wife chuckled and he realized how ridiculous the situation had become.

"The distressing part," he told me, "is having the feeling of something always crawling on you. Like, if you get around somebody who has lice, and now you're always itching because you know they have lice."

"So it's psychological," I said.

"It's psychological," he said. "And yet, you actually do have them on you."

He tried leaving different foods on his floor overnight, to figure out how he might bait and kill the ants, as he did with the feral hogs. He tried doughnuts, crushed-up Cheerios, bread crumbs — "anything a normal ant would be attracted to," he told me. He claims they touched none of it.

He can't fathom what the ants want — why they've come. They are frightening because they make no sense, because of the utter disarray of their existence. "They run around the floors like they're on crack, and then they die," he said. "They're freakin' crazy, man."

The ants are called crazy ants. That's their actual name. Many people call them Rasberry crazy ants, and some people call them Tawny crazy ants and refuse to call them Rasberry crazy ants. The enmity between these people, I found, can be extraordinary.

Entomologists report that the crazy ants, like other ants, seem drawn to electronic devices — car stereos, circuit boxes, machinery. But with crazy ants, so many will stream inside a device that they form a single, squirming mass that completes a circuit and shorts it. Crazy ants have ruined laptops this way and, according to one exterminator, have also temporarily shut down chemical plants. They are most likely climbing into these cavities to investigate possible nesting sites. But as David Oi, a research entomologist at the Department of Agriculture, told me, the science-fiction-ish theory that the bugs are actually attracted to the electricity itself can't be ruled out.

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of "Wild Ones," a book about people and wild animals in America.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

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