It’s a fine summer afternoon. You’re kneeling in your garden and pulling weeds, or sitting on a blanket and enjoying a picnic. Suddenly you feel a sharp, heat-filled sting on your leg — and then another and another. You look down and see dozens or even hundreds of red ants swarming over your body. They also called
Without realizing it, you kneeled or set down your blanket on top of a fire ant mound, and now you’re paying a painful price for your intrusion.
“They’re really a miserable ant species,” says Michael Merchant, PhD, a professor of entomology at Texas A&M University in Dallas.
Dr. Merchant says that when he and his wife moved to Texas many years ago, they had a horrific, picnic-spoiling fire ant experience like the one described above. And as the species has spread across much of the southern half of the continental United States, many people have had similar run-ins with fire ants. “In Texas and a lot of the Southwest, they’ve made going outside and sitting on the ground a pleasure of the past,” he says.
It’s thought that fire ants arrived in the United States in the 1930s via cargo ships traveling from South America. And since then, they’ve become an “ecological disaster,” Merchant says. “Wherever they go, they lower biodiversity and attack other ants and animals.”
Unfortunately their prey includes humans. Fire ants are among the very few types of domestic ants that frequently bite people. They also called dangerous ant bites.
But saying that these ants “bite” is actually inaccurate. “Fire ants don’t bite, they deliver a sting via their tail,” Merchant says. “Only the females sting, and their stinger is very sharp and delivers venom.”
Fire ants aren’t a problem in most places that experience freezing temps during winter. But there are other species of ant that live in northern states that do occasionally bite or sting. In some cases, those attacks can be quite serious.