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Crazy Rasberry Ants – A recently discovered species of ants are invading some Houston, Texas communities.

Crazy Rasberry Ants

Called crazy rasberry ants because of their irratic movement patterns and the exterminator, Tom Rasberry, who identified them about six years ago.

Crazy Rasberry Ant in Houston Area

The crazy ants are reddish-brown and about the size of a flea and their numbers are estimated to be in the billions. They don’t move in regimented lines like most ants, hence the term crazy.

Crazy ants seem immune to typical ant killers and the crazy rasberry ants are even resistant to most professional exterminator products.

These crazy ants aren’t all bad. They eat pesky fire ants that deliver a painful sting, but they also attack electrical wiring and computers.

They have caused havoc at sewage pumping stations, destroyed computers and at least one gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been seen at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and near Hobby Airport, though problems related to crazy rasberry ants have not been reported at those locations yet.

Unlike other types of ants, crazy rasberry ants have more than one queen per colony so they are even harder to eliminate. When you do kill crazy rasberry ants, the survivors pile up the dead, sometimes using them like a bridge to cross over surfaces treated with pesticide.

Crazy Ants

Maybe this will give Disney and Pixar yet another angle on bugs and ants for yet another insect movie.

And that’s the latest chatter about crazy rasberry ants.

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