Return to First Page---ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 53 (Autumn 1994), p. 321
A distinct species, the red imported fire ant, seems to have entered the country in the same way in the 1930s (2). Although the two species both spread along the Gulf Coast and upward through Alabama and Mississippi, the red strain eventually dominated the black strain as well as native species of fire ants (3). Today the black imported fire ant is found only in northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama (4).
The imported fire ants are omnivorous, competing with native fire ants for insects, seeds, and growing plants, as well as mucous and liquid matter associated with hatching eggs and newborn mammals. The last two preferences cause the ants to swarm upon and kill newborn animals which are in the vicinity of fire ant colonies (5). The ants create earthen mounds of a few inches to several feet in height and circumference as part of complex nests that extend below ground. They vigorously defend these nest, rushing to attack any creature which treads on or near the mounds (6). In defending their nests from damage, the ants swarm over trespassers, repeatedly stinging them. Their stings rarely are fatal to such trespassers but are irritating to livestock and painful to humans.
- After flying up from their mounds and mating midair, impregnated queens
travel short distances before burrowing into the ground to establish new
colonies. Human intervention assists this natural system of migration,
often by transporting nursery stock and soil which is infested with colonies
of the ants.
- __________________
- 2. Vinson and Sorensen, "Imported Fire Ants," 4-5.
- 3. Wilson, "Invader of the South," 281; Helga Olkowski, "Coping with Imported Fire Ants," Common
- Sense Pest Control 5 (Spring 1989): 10
- 4. Vinson and Sorensen, "Imported Fire Ants," 5
- 5. Agricultural Research Service, Plant Pest Control Division, The Fight Against the Imported Fire
- Ant, Program Aid No. 368, (Washington, D.C.: USDA, 1958), 12-17; Vinson and Sorensen, "Imported Fire Ants," 5
- 6. Vinson and Sorensen, "Imported Fire Ants," 13.
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