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Controlling Fire Ants
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18195 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
1,776 Words |
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Jessica Morrison Silva
Jessica Morrison Silva is a public affairs specialist with the
U.S. Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland. |
They are agricultural pests. They are medical pests. But transportation pests?
Strange, but true. Red imported fire ants, infamous for chewing up crops and leaving blisterlike pustules on people and animals, have revealed yet one more odious habit: destroying roads.
They're not picky; they'll destroy either concrete or asphalt. But they have different methods for each.
At the Navy's Camp Lejune in North Carolina, fire ants crawled underneath asphalt roads to keep warm in late fall and early spring, and later carried bits of soil out from under the roads, leaving behind intricate tunnels. Then, when traffic come along - instant pothole. The ants caused 160 potholes, each costing North Carolina's Department of Transportation $200 to fix.
For new concrete section of Interstate 75 in Tampa, Florida, the ants had a different destructive approach: After entering naturally formed tuners underneath the silicone sealant in joints between highway sections, they burrowed upward. "Every so often, they'd feel the urge to come up," says William A. Banks, an entomologist with the Laboratory of Insects Affecting Man and Animals in Gainesville, Florida. The lab is operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).
Banks counted 226 holes in 3,085 yards of sealant. In areas where fire ants are causing problems, sealant repair costs range from $132 to $301 per highway mile, and fire ant control is additionally about $90 per mile each year.
To reduce fire ant road damage in both North Carolina and Florida, Banks recommended that officials have the ants killed with a bait that contains the insecticide hydramethylnon.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Banks and his colleagues discovered three products - hydramethylnon, the insect growth regulator fenoxycarb, and the toxin abamectin, which is secreted by the soil fungus Streptomyces avermitilis - that proved effective against fire ants. Attractive bait products that are now widely used for fire ant control were developed as a result of these studies.
One problem, however, says Banks, is that these three products are registered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for
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