Southern California residents, having weathered fire, floods, riots, and a 6.7 earthquake in recent years, are now enduring—what else?—pestilence. The culprit is Linepithema humile, a tiny ant that hitchhiked to New Orleans aboard ships from Argentina (or perhaps Brazil) sometime around the turn of the century and has since spread over much of the United States.
Last August, University of California at San Diego researchers reported that Linepithema, besides being a tenacious household pest—They don’t sting or bite humans, but once inside your house, they’re a pain to get rid of, says graduate student Andrew Suarez—is also wreaking agricultural and ecological havoc in California.
The Argentine ants, as they’re called, are prolific and mobile. Each colony contains multiple queens, each queen produces thousands of eggs a day, and the same ant family, UCSD ecologist Ted Case has discovered, may have found colonies miles apart. Too much rain or heat, and ...
