Caribbean crazy ants march in

SARASOTA COUNTY - The reddish-brown ants swarmed everywhere on Gayle and Greg Deas' five-acre lot east of Interstate 75, near Myakka City.

They covered the walkways. They marched along a garden hose in the grass. They coated trees with living masses of movement.

When they showed up in the bathtub, Gayle had had enough. She bought a can of bug killer and started spraying the lanai. Within a week, she had filled half of a five-gallon bucket with dead ants.

It turns out Deas was fighting Paratrechina pubens, exotic invaders better known as Caribbean crazy ants.

Named for their point of origin and their erratic movement, Caribbean crazy ants do not sting and rarely bite. That's the good news.

The bad news: No one knows how to get rid of them. And there is no concerted effort to study the insects, which have already been found in most of Florida, including in Charlotte, Manatee and Sarasota counties.

If they keep multiplying at the current rate, they will be coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

The potential is alarming, as Gayle Deas can attest.

"I was embarrassed to have friends come over," she said. "The entire perimeter, the foundation, it was just crawling."

In the two years since she first saw the ants, the situation has improved, but not much. An exterminator has created a barrier 30 feet from the house. While the insecticide treatments continue, the ants live on one side, the Deas family on the other.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's like another plague," Deas says. "We can't get rid of them. And we can't move. No way could we sell our property."

Exotic insects such as fire ants, African bees and Bromeliad-eating weevils are nothing new to Florida. They become pests when they compete with native insects and animals for food and living space.

Lacking the natural predators of their native habitats, invasive species can overrun an area and, in extreme cases, cause the extinction of native species. They are also expensive to fight.

First sighted in Miami and Coral Gables in 1953, the Caribbean crazies have spread widely. Severe infestations have been recorded around Lake Okeechobee and in West Palm Beach, Jacksonville and Miami.

Scientists know very little about the ants, although they have pieced together a few biological and behavioral characteristics, mostly from field observations.

Crazy ants build super colonies. While fire ants live in single mounds of perhaps a couple thousand individuals, Caribbean crazies gather in hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Each nest can have multiple queens. Foragers from different nests do not mind mingling, and an infested area generally has multiple nests, which can be found under leaves, in old fire ant mounds, or even in cars.

Often, the nests cannot be found, because the ants seem to forage over great distances. Ants that show up in one yard could be coming from nests as far as a half-mile away, hindering eradication.

Crazy ants appear to be protein-feeders, eating other insects, plant juices and the occasional bird hatchling. By their sheer numbers, the crazies eat or drive out just about every other crawling insect in their territory.

That is every beetle, every ant, every spider.

"What I've seen with the crazy ants beats everything," says Phil Koehler, professor of entomology at the University of Florida. "You can kill billions of them and not make any headway. You can kill them 3 inches deep and the survivors just move over them."

Actually, killing them is easy: They succumb to a number of common pesticides. But until research pinpoints their breeding and feeding habits, pest control operators are left with no sure protocols for eradication.

Koehler says $50,000 to $100,000 would finance some meaningful research, but one of the major sources for grants, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has not recognized Caribbean crazy ants as a threat to livestock or crops.

Nor have the ants caught the interest of chemical companies, which sponsor research in hope of developing products for sale.

That leaves treatment hit and miss.

Exterminator Ken Micklow of Gardenmasters in Venice, attacks the Caribbean crazies at about 15 properties from North Port to Bradenton. He has also been treating the Deas property, where he thinks he has hit on something that at least holds the ants at bay.

He declines to disclose his strategy, which took six months and a couple of thousand dollars to develop.

"It's a trade secret," he says, albeit one that works only temporarily. "Once the barriers come down, the ants come back."

The Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida identifies entomologist Fred Santana as the first to find a Caribbean crazy ant infestation in Sarasota County, in 2002. At the time, Santana headed pest management for Sarasota County.

Although he has retired, Santana still keeps on top of the area's bug news, which led him to a disturbing discovery recently. Crazy ants have invaded the Celery Fields, a storm water retention area, nature preserve and popular bird-watching venue on Palmer Road east of Sarasota.

The environmentally sensitive fields are a poor location for wholesale spraying of insecticides, so Santana has lobbied IFAS to set up ant bait stations there.

Rudy Scheffrahn, an IFAS researcher in Dania, has prepared a bait study for another pest species, white-footed ants. He says he might also try the baits on Caribbean crazy ants in Sarasota. That is just a possibility, though, not a commitment.

And Santana understands the reluctance to spend scarce grant money on crazy ants. "There's some research people just shy away from," he says. "The chance of success is so unlikely."