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When Solenopsis invicta, a.k.a. the red imported fire ant, was first identified in East Texas, in the seventies, stakes were high. Since hitching a ride from Brazil to Alabama in a ship’s ballast a few decades earlier, the insects had resisted all efforts to slow their long march west. Experts predicted that they would wreak untold havoc on Texas’s ecosystem. In response, counties set up quarantine areas that quickly doubled, then tripled, in size. The Texas Department of Agriculture doused more than half a million acres with a chemical called MV-678 that was supposed to render the next generation of fire ants sterile and lazy. (It did not.) Landowners drenched fire ants in diesel oil, convinced that this was an effective method for doing away with…

The post And You Thought Feral Hogs Were Bad. Fire Ants Have Unleashed Chaos in Texas for Decades. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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