Word: ant
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...FIRE ANTS. All kinds of bugs thrive in the warm, humid climate prevalent in much of the South. But none have achieved more notoriety than the fire ant, a South American invader that gained a beachhead in New Orleans in 1918 and has since advanced through nine Southern states. The ants, as their name implies, have searing bites that can kill small animals and raise painful blisters on humans. Farm workers often refuse to enter fields infested with fire ant mounds, which often rise two or three feet above the ground and are sturdy enough to stop a tractor...
...well equipped to survive. (In fact, the durable cockroach evolved into something very similar to its current unpleasant form some 320 million years ago and apparently saw little need for further improvement.) An insect has a strong exterior skeleton and seems disproportionately powerful in relation to its size (an ant can lift 50 times its own weight). Its capacity for flight (most but not all insects can fly), attained about 100 million years before the first flying reptiles or birds, enables it to escape its enemies and range far and wide in search of food. The insect's small size...
Divided into castes that include workers, soldiers and immature young, ants carry out a wide variety of organized activities. Ordinary garden ants herd aphids, which they milk for their sweet nectar. Some species of ants farm, tending crops of tiny fungi in their underground chambers; others take and keep slaves from rival ant colonies. Species like the driver ants of Africa and the army ants of South America conduct military campaigns with a precision that any general would envy, advancing in columns protected by soldiers over routes carefully scouted by advance parties. Ants are also accomplished architects; African termites...
...also been linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Last year, for the same reason, it placed severe restrictions on the sale and use of heptachlor and chlordane, effective termite killers. The EPA has also curtailed the use of Mirex, the pesticide that is most effective against the fire ant as well as harvester and Texas leaf-cutting varieties. Tests showed that the substance is potentially carcinogenic in rats and mice and toxic to such common crustaceans as shrimp, crabs and crayfish...
...currently working on hormones that will prevent insects from molting, or shedding their outer covering, prior to passing on to the next stage of growth, and Martin Jacobson has applied for a patent for a juvenile hormone that affects house, stable and face flies, some mosquitoes and the fire ant. Taking a different approach, Entomologist William Bowers, of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, has isolated two substances from ageratum, a flowering plant, that interfere with an insect's production of juvenile hormones. When these antihormones are applied to immature cotton stainers and Mexican bean beetles, the insects grow...