Texas Imported Fire Ant Research and Management Project

Texas A&M Entomology professor Dr. Patricia Pietrantonio’s fire ant research project was recently featured in a video posted by the science media podcast website EarthSky.

The podcast is located at http://earthsky.org/earth/science-fights-to-control-fire-ants, highlights the destructive impact of red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta Buren) and the ongoing basic research efforts to conceive better strategies to control this pest.

Pietrantonio’s National Science Foundation-funded project, titled “Neuropeptide Receptors and Identification of Genes in Signaling Networks Involved in Reproduction and Nutrition in the Red Imported Fire Ant”, focuses on localizing the neuropeptide receptors in the brains of both queen and worker ants.

She said the neuropeptide receptors may regulate genes that are involved in ant reproduction (via ovarian development, the egg maturing processes), or sensing the ant’s nutritional status.

Pietrantonio said that knowing the physiological mechanisms by which queens sense their nutritional status, reproduce, and by which task allocation occurs in worker ants would possibly help bring solutions to controlling the ants. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, fire ants have generated up to an estimated $5 billion per year in losses.

To help communicate their research to broad audiences, members of Pietrantonio’s lab collaborated with EarthSky to help produce short educational video podcasts both in English and Spanish for both the web and broadcast. The podcast can be seen on the website at earthsky.org

To see the Spanish version of the video, visit https://youtu.be/J9iQfaqBDLY .

Writer: Steve Byrns, 325-653-4576, s-byrns@tamu.edu
Elizabeth “Wizzie” Brown, 512-854-9600,  ebrown@ag.tamu.edu

AUSTIN – Hungry hoards of mosquitoes, katydids, crickets, grasshoppers and other assorted pests-Texans have pretty much seen them all this summer, but will the onslaught stop once cooler weather hits?

“The bugs of summer will subside, but a new slate is ready and willing to move right in with you,” said “Wizzie” Brown, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service integrated pest management specialist at Austin.

“Usually during drought conditions or when the weather begins to get cooler insects and other arthropods like spiders and scorpions will move indoors. In the case of drought, they are often searching for water, and with cooler temperatures, like us, they want a cozy place to stay.”

Brown is a strong advocate of integrated pest management, a series of practices that when used together manages pests in the  most effective and environmentally sound ways available.

She said simply keeping pests out of the house in the first place is the best and easiest way to keep your family safe. She offered the following tips to accomplish that:

– Prune trees and shrubs so they do not touch or overhang the house.
– Don’t stack firewood or anything else against the house.
– Weather strip doors and windows, especially if you see daylight around them.
– Block weep holes in homes with brick or stone facades using steel wool or copper mesh
where rusting steel wool stains could be unsightly.

– Use caulk or expanding foam to fill cracks and crevices on the outside of the home and around pipe and wire penetrations.

– Keep window screens in good repair.
– Use stainless steel mesh to block attic access points.

“As with any unwanted intruder, the trouble starts once they enter your home,” Brown said.

Brown helped develop AgriLife Extension’s ISEC Home Pest Management Program. ISEC stands for the strategies to best manage  pests. They are; Identify, Sanitize, Exclude and Control.

Check it out at  http://ipm.tamu.edu/isec/ to learn the “Top 10 Most Wanted Pests” and how to control them or join her blog at http://urban-ipm.blogspot.com/  .

AUSTIN – Resourceful individuals have tried many  different “home” treatments for fire ant control, but unfortunately lots of them simply don’t pass the science test, according to a Texas AgriLife Extension Service entomologist.

Wizzie Brown, integrated pest management specialist for AgriLife Extension in Travis County, has been putting alternative, non-chemical means of fire ant management to the test for the past few years. She now has collected objective, science-based data to either support or reject claims about the efficacy of some of these proposed home treatments.

“I’ve previously tested whether club soda was an effective means of control after getting inquiries from people who had read about this on the Internet,” Brown said. “I also started looking into whether or not other home remedies I’d been told about had any basis in scientific fact as fire ant treatments.”

Brown said her most recent trials dealt with anecdotal information that coffee grounds could be used as a treatment.

“Many gardeners utilize recycled coffee grounds from commercial operations or grounds from their own coffee brewing in their garden for composting,” Brown said. “And since gardeners tend to be rather resourceful, some have tried using coffee grounds for other purposes, including managing red imported fire ant mounds.”

In 2010, Brown tested coffee grounds obtained from the Starbucks “Grounds for Your Garden” program as an individual mound treatment for fire ants. She spread a cup of used grounds over a test mound and noted fire ant activity in and around the mound several times over a 30-day period.

“The home remedy of spreading one cup of used coffee grounds over a fire ant mound failed to kill the fire ants,” she said. “The amount of activity after applying the grounds was the same as on the control mounds receiving no treatment.”

Brown said while coffee grounds make for good composting material, her research showed that when put to the test, they are simply ineffective toward killing fire ants.

“It would be nice to have a handy way to dispose of coffee grounds awhile simultaneously killing fire ants,” she said, “but in this case, it just didn’t pan out.”

Brown also recently tested whether ground cinnamon may be an effective treatment.

“I also received inquiries from Travis County residents and had seen on several Internet sites that ground cinnamon was being touted as a useful fire ant control method,” she said.

Brown established a similar methodology to test the cinnamon, sprinkling one tablespoon over the mound as an individual treatment, noting ant activity several times over a one-month period.

“I applied the ground cinnamon the same way one would apply a pesticide dust labeled for control,” she said.

As with the coffee grounds, Brown compared activity on the treated mound with untreated control-mound activity.

“In this instance, it turned out that there was actually more fire ant activity in the treated mound than the untreated control,” she said.

This spring, Brown will be investigating the efficacy of two other home treatments —  oak ash and cayenne pepper.

“These are two other treatments that have been brought to my attention as possible alternatives to commercial pesticides,” she said. “It should be interesting to find out whether or not science supports their usefulness as a method of fire ant control.”

In 2009, Brown tested club soda as “an environmentally friendly cure for fire ants,” as was stated on a gardening website.

“The site suggested the reader pour two cups of club soda directly onto the center of a fire ant mound to control the colony,” Brown said. “This message found its way into gardening forums and was picked up by media – all without any scientific testing to back it up.”

Brown said the site claimed the carbon dioxide in the soda would displace the oxygen and suffocate the ants, including the queen, killing the entire colony within about 48 hours.

“It also claimed that the club soda would leave no toxic residue, would not contaminate ground water and would not indiscriminately kill other insects or harm pets,” she said. “Pretty much all that part was true, but what wasn’t true was that it would be effective in killing fire ants, unless of course you happen to drown a few in the process.”

Brown said her observations and data obtained from the trial showed there was no evidence of  fire ant  control resulting from pouring club soda onto a mound.

“It did not lead to the ants dying a horrendous death,” she said. “However, it did produce lots of impressive bubbling action.”

Brown said results of the club soda field trial and other home treatments have been or will be posted on the Texas Imported Fire Ant Research and Management Project website at http://fireant.tamu.edu.

She added that the site also shows results of other home remedy field tests by herself and other AgriLife Extension and Texas AgriLife Research ntegrated pest management experts. Other home remedies for fire ant control that have been or will be tested  by agency entomologists include aspartame, molasses, Epsom salts, orange juice and cola.

“There’s a lot of misinformation about home fire ant control out there,” Brown said. “And while it’s important to be environmentally responsible and minimize the use of chemicals that may also kill beneficial insects, harm pets or possibly enter the water table, the thoughtful, careful use of commercial pesticides specifically labeled for control is probably still your best defense against them.”

Brown and other AgriLife Extension integrated pest management specialists in major urban areas of the state also conduct community-wide control efforts. More information on who to contact about these efforts also can be found on the Texas fire ant project website

January 3, 2012
By: Steve Byrns

COLLEGE STATION – Like Old West cattle barons in a B-western, red imported fire ants are expanding their range and increasing their herds while laying wholesale waste to the range, according to an expert on the issue.

Dr. Micky Eubanks, a Texas AgriLife Research entomologist at College Station, said the ants are using a practice known as “mutualism” to help them thrive despite the estimated $1 billion Americans pour into controlling them annually.

“Mutualisms play key roles in the functioning of ecosystems,” Eubanks said. “In this case, fire ants protect aphids in exchange for the honeydew that aphids produce and the ants eat. Native ants also do this, however a study by our team recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science determined that mutualisms involving introduced species such as the red imported fire ant can actually enhance invasion success and ultimately disrupt entire native ecosystems.”

Eubanks said the phenomenon has received relatively little attention in scientific circles prior to this study.

The team, consisting of Eubanks and lead researcher, Dr. Shawn Wilder, Texas A&M University entomologist; Dr. David Holway, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California; Dr. Andrew Suarez, departments of entomology and animal biology, University of Illinois and Dr. Edward LeBrun, Brackenridge Field Laboratory, University of Texas, examined how access to food-for-protection mutualisms involving the red imported fire ant aids the success of this prominent invader.

He said intense competition with other ants and insects in the pest’s native Argentina checks their explosive success there, but in the U.S. the invaders dominate the range, running rough-shod over the native ants while making full use of the aphid “cows’” nourishing honeydew.

The research team found that the carbohydrate-rich substance known as “honeydew”- that sticky fecal substance that drips on your car from aphids feeding on tree leaves – is a magic elixir to the ants. It gives them the energetic edge needed to out-forage native species and conquer new territory.

“Laboratory and field experiments demonstrated that honeydew with its high carbohydrate content dramatically increases fire ant colony growth, a crucial factor of competitive performance,” he said. “We examined colony growth by rearing fire ants with and without honeydew-producing aphids. After seven weeks, laboratory ant colonies with access to honeydew-producing aphids were 20 percent larger than those grown with cotton plants, but no aphids, even though both colonies had all the insect prey they could eat.

“Our findings support the hypothesis that although mutualisms help generate and maintain biodiversity in our native flora and fauna, introduced species such as the red imported fire ant can infiltrate these networks and divert resources for their own success with potentially devastating consequences to their native neighbors.”

For more information on the published work titled: “Intercontinental differences in resource use reveal the importance of mutualisms in fire ant invasions,” go to the Discovery Blog article: http://tinyurl.com/7end6gy or for the complete work, go to: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1115263108