In holy-crap-nature-is-objectively-horrifying news: Fire ants displaced by flooding from Hurricane Harvey are banding together to form some Power Rangers Megazord nightmare raft made of their wiggly live-bug bodies.
But, really, we’re fine. It’s fine.
As the Atlantic reported, some brave Texans on Twitter have noticed the ants performing this scary survival maneuver — where they form living rafts and float through the floods until they reach dry land. One Twitter user shared a photo from his aunt’s home in Cuero, Texas where the fire ants have gone beyond “raft” to create a creepy continent of live buggy-bodies. (Sincerely and from the bottom of my heart: Yikes.)
Meanwhile, in Cuero, the river has brought my aunt all of the fire ants. Yes, those are all (of the) fire ants. pic.twitter.com/dEibWYxAdl
— Bill O’Zimmermann (@The_Reliant) August 29, 2017
Alex Wild, one Entomology expert and curator of entomology at University of Texas at Austin responded to the above photo on Twitter with an alarming (if reasonable) level of surprise: “Holy crap. I have never, in my entire career as an ant researcher, seen *anything* like this.”
Wild later told the Atlantic that the little critters just “love floods” because it helps them get around.
Just in case that’s not enough to give you night terrors, these ants level up. Another entomologist, Linda Bui, from Louisiana State University, told The Atlantic that flood victims from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans encountered these floating ants—and got their fair share of rashes from walking through flood waters.
“They were like something none of the medical professionals had ever seen,” Bui said. “I was like, ‘Those are literally fire ant stings on top of fire ant stings.’”
Bui later did some research, publishing a study in 2011 that confirmed that these flood-surviving ants are even more dangerous and aggro than their regular dry counterparts — because they have 165 percent more venom inside them. The ant rafts have staying power too and can last between one and three weeks.
While a small silver lining in this mutant insect-infested storm is that they love to eat ticks, there’s some more good news for people who might encounter these floating feats of nature: The ants are darkest before the Dawn—because dish soap can break up the nightmare ant islands.
“Dawn is a not a registered insecticide,” Bui told the Atlantic, “but it will break up the surface tension and they will sink.”