Fire Ants: Their True Story Told By The Scientist Who Loves Them

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A fire ant queen and her retinue of attending workers. The workers constantly feed the queen groom her and take away the eggs she lays. This queen from a middle sized colony laid an egg every minute or two. Credit: Walter R. Tschinkel
A fire ant queen and her retinue of attending workers. The workers constantly feed the queen, groom her, and take away the eggs she lays. This queen from a middle sized colony laid an egg every minute or two. Credit: Walter R. Tschinkel

When it comes to fire ants, most people prefer to wipe the venomous little varmints off the face of the Earth - or at least out of their own back yards. The reviled South American native that invaded the U.S. Sun Belt via 1940s Mobile, Ala., is known in biology circles as Solenopsis invicta and everywhere else as a painful pest in the grass, so to speak.


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