Unnerving video shows ‘dangerous’ ant piles floating through Texas. Here’s why
Need another nightmare reason to avoid wading into flood waters created by tropical storms and hurricanes — other than the possibility of drowning?
How about floating ant piles?
Posted by League City, Texas, on its official Twitter account, an unnerving video shows groups of ants banding together while floating across Countryside Park.
“This is one of the reasons why you should avoid walking through flood water,” read the tweet. “Floating ant piles — like this one found at Countryside Park — can form and be very dangerous.”
Why are they dangerous? It’s likely they’re fire ants.
Fire ants are common when there’s flooding along the Gulf coast, The Atlantic says, and are a familiar sight to Texans in hurricane territory. Following Hurricane Harvey in 2017, floating colonies of fire ants, as many as 500,000 in a group, were seen banding together to stay above the flood water in Houston.
Experts on fire ants say the same thing: Stay as far away as possible. In some situations, “they are capable of sending a person with an allergy into anaphylactic shock,” NPR reported.
Paul Nester, a fire ant expert at Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Service, told NPR that people shouldn’t try to poke at the floating raft or attempt to drown them because it will backfire.
“If anybody comes in contact with that, hits it, well then, the ants immediately will stream onto that person just like they would onto a log or onto a bank because they’re looking for high ground,” Nester told NPR.