Crazy Ants Invade!

Ants play a role in The Uninvited. Fire ants (Solenopsis richteri Forel and Solenopsis invicta Buren). But last week I’d read an article about a new variety of ant causing a ruckus in the southeastern U.S. What are they called?

Crazy ants.

Or, as they are officially called, “Tawny crazy ants.”

And, apparently, they come in colors, like black, red, or yellow.

And can sport wings.

They’re omnivores and take over areas by killing, and what they don’t kill, starve out. They don’t bite and sting like fire ants, but they get into everything. Inside and out. Nest inside walls, crawl spaces, house plants, empty containers. Bags of leaves. Anywhere and everywhere. And their populations are incredibly dense. Experts say at least fire ants were…polite. Yes, that’s the term used. Fire ants at least stayed around their outside mounds, and only interacted if you interrupted their lives, like came plowing through their mounds.

This all kind of reminds of the 1974 Phase IV novel and movie.

I mean, where do these kinds of things come from? Why do they exist? It seems we get used to one critter, and another comes along and takes its place. Or is it something much more insidious? Could it be…an alien invasion? Did Barry Malzberg, Mayo Simon, and Saul Bass know something we didn’t know? Mother Nature fighting back?

Or…do we attract the crazy ants, the fire ants, the killer bees into our lives?

There is the old adage, “Like attracts Like.”

Aphorisms like these usually have some form of truth to them. What if (remember, I’m “What-if” Guy)…all our Human-generated angst is bringing these kinds of infestations into life? And not just the crazy ants, but the crazy weather, the crazy politics, the crazy despots? If “Like” truly does attract “Like,” might this be how it would manifest in real life? That all our collective fears, collective angsts, which really are another form of energy (exactly like electromagnetic radiation; everything has a frequency, matter is just another form of energy), and all forms of energy radiate (even Black Holes radiate), because all of life is about energy, the change in its state, the manipulation of it…what if we’re the ones bringing these “intrusions” into our lives, and it’s not really about any so-called “invasions”? And it’s not that what we’re experiencing is anything new. Throughout Human history we see the nasty, but what I’m getting at, is, what if we’re the ones bringing the nasty upon ourselves? What if we cause our own experiences—good and bad—and we are not at the whim of “exteriorized” forces?

Or…I could just be full of it, and it really could just be Phase V of the invasion….

Related articles

• Invasion of Crazy Ants Maddening For Southern U.S. (natureworldnews.com)
• ‘Crazy’ Ants Spread Through Southeast U.S. (breitbart.com)
• Good-Bye Fire Ants, Hello Crazy Ants – Invasive Species Causing Big Ecological Changes (latinospost.com)