Crazy ant invades the US South

The southern United States is being invaded - again. This time it is erratic but troublesome "crazy ants" from South America marching - actually, hitching rides - setting up massive colonies and relieving other occupying ant armies, including fire ants, of their duties.

With billions of ants possible per hectare, crazy ants, known for their random, jerky travel, eat or chase away most other insects and reptiles, and hound yard pets inside.

In single numbers pretty innocuous-looking, the tiny ants also make pests out of themselves by sometimes biting people and shorting out home electrical wiring.

The question now is whether there is room enough in the South for the newcomers, or whether the US needs to invest in research to figure out how to stop the "tawny crazy ant", as well as its cousins, the "black crazy ant" and the "Caribbean crazy ant", before they are ubiquitous.

"The entire Gulf coast is going to be inundated in a very short period of time," entomologist Tom Rasberry, who found and identified the crazy ants in 2002, recently told a local CBS News broadcast.

Having already spread in the span of a decade from a bunch of counties surrounding Houston to as far away as Florida, crazy ant success so far is entirely due to their hitchhiking skills.