On her last day of sleepaway camp in 2024, 8-year-old Lucy crept barefoot in a field of tall grass, plotting her next move in a game of capture the counselor, when she felt a stinging sensation on both of her feet.
"I tried to keep calm," Lucy, now 10, said. "But I think I started crying. I told one of the counselors and they started a group of people who needed to go to the nurse."
Lucy's feet were swarming with fire ants after she stepped in two massive mounds. By the time she rinsed her feet off with a sprinkler, it was too late. She counted more than 60 stings on each foot.
"The recovery was long and torturous," her mom, Meghan Goddin, said. "It was several weeks before the itching subsided and many months for the physical scars to disappear. We are still waiting for the psychological scars to fade — she refuses to go back to sleepaway camp even two years later."
If you've lived in Austin long enough — or at least walked around barefoot a couple of times — you've likely felt the wrath of a fire ant, too.
Fire ants might seem as Texan as two-step, but they are actually invasive, having arrived on a ship from South America to Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s. Today they are mostly considered a nuisance — save for some Austinites like Lucy who said fire ants are now her "worst enemy." But for a period of Texas history, the red imported fire ant was among the biggest threats to the state's ecosystem, agriculture industry and public health.
Spreading like 'syrup on a plate'
Larry Gilbert, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, has been researching the red imported fire ant at UT's Brackenridge Field Laboratory since 1981. Back then, he said fire ant mounds were spreading across the state like "syrup on a plate."
"You could just walk across Texas on fire ants," Gilbert said. "You could say waltz across Texas. You definitely need to be hopping and skipping. You wouldn't want to stand there."
It didn't happen suddenly. State and local leaders caught wind the fire ants were migrating west from Mobile as early as the 1950s. An Austin American-Statesman article from 1958 with the headline "Fire Ant Outbreak" rang the alarm bells: "These ants migrate," it read. "And the infestation is spreading in this direction."
Farmers reported fire ants were killing baby cattle, spoiling crops and shorting out electrical equipment. Biologists warned they could harm birds, toads and other insects. Newspapers reminded the public that in rare cases, a fire ant sting is lethal to humans.
In 1998, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service estimated fire ants were costing Texans $1.2 billion annually.
"People were running for Texas [agricultural] commissioner on a platform of, 'Let's eradicate fire ants,'" Gilbert said.
Local officials encouraged residents to douse fire ant mounds with insecticides and report sightings to the county health department. But Gilbert said chemicals weren't working, and even if they had, it wouldn't have been a long-term solution: new studies were coming out that the pesticides being used — chlordane, heptachlor and mirex — were carcinogenic. All were phased out by the late '70s and later banned by the Environmental Protection Agency.
It seemed like Texans were giving up on the possibility of fire ants being wiped from the state. In 1976, The Austin American-Statesman ran a story with the headline: "Fire Ants: They're here, and there's not much we can do about it."
Catching a predator
The red imported fire ant couldn't be eradicated, but Gilbert believes his team's research at least helped control the population in Austin.
On a trip to the countryside of Brazil in the mid-80s, Gilbert saw something peculiar. Red imported fire ants were still a dominant ant in the country's ecosystem, but their mounds didn't carpet the land like they did in Texas. Keeping the mounds at bay was something that didn't exist yet in the U.S.: a natural predator.
"In a field the size of a football field, you might have five or six species of these little [phorid] flies that attack the fire ants and inject eggs into them and cause great chaos," Gilbert said.
The flies not only killed some ants, but they also made it harder for them to forage for food.
A video of the process now plays on a loop on a flat-screen TV mounted in the hallway of the Brackenridge Field Laboratory. A tiny phorid fly, no bigger than the size of Lincoln's nose on a penny, taunts a small colony of fire ants. The fly darts into an ant's body, lays an egg, leaving the ant slightly paralyzed, and darts off. The larva eventually moves to the ant's head, which causes the head to fall off and the ant to die.
The discovery set Gilbert's team on a decades-long mission to naturalize four species of phorid flies in Texas.
"We get congratulations from ranchers saying, 'Since the flies got here, I'm seeing more quail, I'm starting to see lizards," he said. "I always say, well, I can't claim that we did it, because maybe it was the drought, maybe it was this, maybe it was that … but we're pretty convinced that it has had a damping effect."
An 'invincible' pest
The phorid fly may have contributed to a slow, widespread decline in red imported fire ant populations in Texas, but mounds are still ubiquitous in Austin backyards, parks and summer camps.
Local colonies can be hard to get rid of. Fire ants can survive a variety of climates and even form rafts out of their own bodies during floods. It's no wonder that the the Latin genus for the red imported fire ant is Solenopsis invicta, meaning "invincible."
Wizzie Brown, an entomologist with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, said a genetic mutation that may have occurred when the red imported fire ant arrived in the U.S. may have made them especially hard to kill.
"A lot of people like to think they can manage fire ants by digging up one fire ant mound and dumping it on another one, and they're like, 'Oh they're going to fight to the death and it's going to be awesome,' which it totally would be awesome," Brown said. "If you have single queen colonies, that would work, but unfortunately here in Texas, we have multiple queen colonies … and they are all pumping out hundreds, if not a thousand eggs a day. … So if a queen dies, there's backups."
But there are effective ways to manage fire ants.
Brown said fire ants will "essentially kill themselves off for you" if you use a bait product, such as corn grits covered in soybean oil and a slow-acting insecticide. Gilbert said he's gotten rid of individual colonies by waiting until the brood surfaces after a rainstorm and pouring boiling water over the mound.
Don't scratch that itch
If you do accidentally step in a fire ant mound: be warned.
Brown said fire ants both sting and bite, and they come out in droves. When a mound is agitated, ants release alarm pheromones, signaling to hundreds of female workers it's time to attack.
"The first thing they do is they bite you, and they really, really hold on with their mandibles," Brown said. "You can't just shake them off your hand like you would some other ant. … They will continue to sting you until you brush them off of your body."
Stings results in itchy, sometimes painful pustules. But don't scratch or pop them — breaking them open can cause infection. Instead, treat them with a cold compress or anti-itch ointment. Bites should subside in 7 to 10 days.
If you have fire ants in your backyard and are struggling to get rid of them, Brown said you can rest easy knowing they at least help aerate soil and contribute to the food chain.
"It's not a fabulous benefit … but when people ask me 'do they do anything good?' Those are the only two things I got," she said.
"And if you're new to Texas, watch where you step."
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