A couple of years ago, I wrote about the life history of ant-decapitating phorid flies and how they might help control the fire ants that are invading the American South. This week, a wave of excitement has washed over the internet about the “zombie ants” these flies make, fueled by an announcement from Texas A&M University that they’ve released fire ants infected with a new South American species of phorid fly on a plot of land in east Texas. Despite the way it sounds, the fly isn’t ‘new’ in the sense of being “developed in a lab to take out ants;” it’s just ‘new’ to being part of these field experiments. In fact, evolution already did the job of turning these flies into fire ant scourges: the fly is a parasitoid from the ants’ original Argentinean home. Because the fly only parasitizes the imported fire ants it can’t run amok over our native ant species. And because this fly dive-bombs foraging ants (some great photos of a related species of fly in action can be found over at Photo Synthesis), the hope is that they’ll disrupt the normal growth of fire ant colonies – not just by killing workers in the course of making more flies, but by making the ants drop their food and run for their lives.
Photo by Sanford Porter (via USDA).
More on the project at:
The Texas Imported Fire Ant Research and Management Project
The University of Texas at Austin Fire Ant Project
that photos link needs fixing
Posted by: Drhoz | May 15, 2009 at 10:13 PM
Fixed. And I added one while I was at it.
Posted by: DianeAKelly | May 15, 2009 at 10:38 PM