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    <title>Yes, That&#39;s a Huge Floating Mass of Live Fire Ants in Texas  - The Atlantic</title>

    

        
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            <h1 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Yes, That's a Huge Floating Mass of Live Fire Ants in Texas </h1>
            
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                        <span class="caption">A fire ant raft after Hurricane Harvey in Pearland, Texas </span>
                    
                    
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        <section id="article-section-1"><p>When there is flooding along the Gulf Coast, there are fire ants. The invasive ants congregate into living rafts, drifting through water until they reach solid ground again. It’s a time-honed survival strategy.</p><p>But when there is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the-houston-hospital-running-out-of-food/538266/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'538365'">Hurricane</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/will-flooding-in-texas-lead-to-more-mosquito-borne-illness/538242/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'1',r'538365'">Harvey-</a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-leaves-houston-under-water/538215/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'2',r'538365'">level</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/1857/11/hurricane-harvey-flooding/538044/" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'3',r'538365'">flooding</a>, there are not just small rafts but huge, dense mats of fire ants.</p><p>“Holy crap. I have never, in my entire career as an ant researcher, seen *anything* like this,” <a href="https://twitter.com/Myrmecos/status/902540566612901888" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'4',r'538365'">tweeted</a> <a href="http://www.alexanderwild.com/About-Alex-Wild" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'5',r'538365'">Alex Wild</a>, curator of entomology at University of Texas at Austin, in response to the image below.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Meanwhile, in Cuero, the river has brought my aunt all of the fire ants. Yes, those are all (of the) fire ants. <a href="https://t.co/dEibWYxAdl" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'6',r'538365'">pic.twitter.com/dEibWYxAdl</a></p>
— Bill O'Zimmermann (@The_Reliant) <a href="https://twitter.com/The_Reliant/status/902536760038711296" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'7',r'538365'">August 29, 2017</a></blockquote><p>Of course, Wild told me, it is all perfectly logical. “They actually love floods,” says Wild. “It’s how they get around.” Fire ants displaced by water form rafts; a lot of fire ants displaced by a lot of water will form really big rafts. But still! The sheer size of them is incredible.</p></section><div class="ad-boxinjector-wrapper"><gpt-ad id="boxinjector1" targeting-pos="boxinjector1" class="ad ad-boxinjector" lazy-load="2" data-object-pk="1" data-object-name="boxinjector"><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[0, 0]" sizes="[[300, 250], [320, 350], [300, 350], [1, 3], [320, 520], [320, 430], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[760, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1010, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1, 3], [768, 350], [768, 520], [640, 360], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset><gpt-sizeset viewport-size="[1050, 0]" sizes="[[728, 90], [728, 350], [970, 250], [1024, 350], [1, 3], [970, 350], [760, 350], [1, 4], [1, 5]]"></gpt-sizeset></gpt-ad></div><section id="article-section-2"><p>After Hurricane Katrina, <a href="http://www.lsuagcenter.com/profiles/lhooper" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'8',r'538365'">Linda Bui</a>, an entomologist at Louisiana State University, remembers seeing evacuees from New Orleans come into a field hospital with bands of unexplained rashes around their legs and waists after wading through floodwaters. “They were like something none of the medical professionals had ever seen,” she says. “I was like, ‘Those are literally fire ant stings on top of fire ant stings.’”</p><p>The episode stuck in Bui’s head, and later, she investigated the venom of flooded fire ants. The <a href="https://www.csuchico.edu/biol/Sociobiology/volume/sociobiologyv57n22011.html#8" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'9',r'538365'">study</a>, published in 2011, found that flooded fire ants deliver higher doses of venom because they have 165 percent as much venom inside them as normal fire ants. The flooding made them more aggressive and dangerous. It is also important, she says, to be careful during post-hurricane cleanup. Piles of debris can act like islands, where fire ants have congregated during the flood.</p><aside class="pullquote instapaper_ignore">“Dawn is a not a registered insecticide, but it will break up the surface tension and they will sink.”</aside><p>Fire ant rafts do have a kryptonite: dish soap. “Dawn is a not a registered insecticide, but it will break up the surface tension and they will sink,” says Bui.</p><p>Hurricane Katrina ended up permanently depressing fire-ant populations around New Orleans. The rafts can last as long as three weeks, says Bui, but most start to fall apart after a week. Because parts of New Orleans stayed flooded for weeks in the time it took water to be pumped out from behind the levees, a lot of those ants ultimately drowned. Afterwards, Bui and her colleagues also initiated a pesticide <a href="http://www.lsuagcenter.com/portals/communications/publications/agmag/archive/2007/fall/fast-prevention-fire-ants-in-new-orleans-postkatrina" data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'10',r'538365'">program to prevent fire ants</a> from returning and colonizing the previously flooded areas. It seems to have worked so far.</p><p>What will happen to the fire ant rafts in Texas will depend in part on how fast the waters recede. It could also depend on who exactly is in these rafts. Fire ants originally formed colonies around a single queen (monogyne), but somewhere along the line, some populations lost the ability to recognize other colonies. These mutant fire ants live in one big interconnected colony with multiple queens (polygyne). “If they’re polygyne, then that’s basically one giant interconnected colony and they’ll disembark and spread out but they’ll be fine,” says Wild. “If they’re monogyne, it’s going to be a territorial mess. Fights. Battles.”</p><p>Whoever lives will have the land all to themselves. There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. The area where the fire ants landed may be crawling with stinging ants for a while. “But it’ll have absolutely no ticks. So it’ll be lovely from that perspective,” says Wild.</p></section>
    
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        <p class="dek"><span><span>Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.</span></span></p>
        
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            <p><span class="smallcaps">J.G. is a lawyer</span> in his early 30s. He’s a fast talker and has the lean, sinewy build of a distance runner. His choice of profession seems preordained, as he speaks in fully formed paragraphs, his thoughts organized by topic sentences. He’s also a worrier—a big one—who for years used alcohol to soothe his anxiety.</p>

<p>J.G. started drinking at 15, when he and a friend experimented in his parents’ liquor cabinet. He favored gin and whiskey but drank whatever he thought his parents would miss the least. He discovered beer, too, and loved the earthy, bitter taste on his tongue when he took his first cold sip.</p>

<p>His drinking increased through college and into law school. He could, and occasionally did, pull back, going cold turkey for weeks at a time. But nothing quieted his anxious mind like booze, and when he didn’t drink, he didn’t sleep. After four or six weeks dry, he’d be back at the liquor store.</p>


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        <p class="dek">Will Toronto turn its residents into Alphabet’s experiment? The answer has implications for cities everywhere.</p>
        
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            <p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Q<span class="smallcaps">uayside is a</span> nondescript, 12-acre chunk of land on the southern edge of Toronto’s downtown. It’s just three miles from my apartment, but getting there takes almost an hour by subway, bus, and foot. When I finally arrive at 333 Lake Shore Boulevard East on a windy day in early January, I find a vacant parking lot full of snow. The abandoned Victory Soya Mills silos loom at its edge—a remnant of the city’s industrial heyday. The plot is half of the future site of Sidewalk Toronto, a “<a href="https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Sidewalk-Labs-Vision-Sections-of-RFP-Submission.pdf">neighborhood built from the internet up</a>” by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs. Lake Ontario is frozen and it’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/cold-weather-united-states-mars/549386/">colder</a> than the surface of Mars the day I go to look at the site.</p>

<p>It’s a far cry from the vision that fills the Sidewalk Toronto <a href="https://sidewalktoronto.ca/">webpage</a>, where a crisp video shot on a sunny day makes the Victory silos look cheerful and full of potential. Torontonians in puffer vests and toques describe a vibrant city bursting at the seams. Toronto’s population <a href="http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/Page.cfm?Lang=E&amp;Geo1=CSD&amp;Code1=3520005&amp;Geo2=PR&amp;Code2=35&amp;Data=Count&amp;SearchText=Prince&amp;SearchType=Begins&amp;SearchPR=01&amp;B1=All">grew</a> by 4.5 percent between 2011 and 2016. The city tolerates a <a href="https://www.lowestrates.ca/blog/finance/how-much-it-costs-live-young-person-toronto-2018">high cost of living</a> and a <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/11/28/rental-vacancy-rates-lowest-in-16-years.html">low rental-vacancy rate</a>.</p>


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        <p class="dek">Digital stardust won’t magically make future cities more affordable or resilient.</p>
        
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            <p>The term “smart city” is interesting yet not important, because nobody defines it. “Smart” is a snazzy political label used by a modern alliance of leftist urbanites and tech industrialists. To deem yourself “smart” is to make the <span class="smallcaps">NIMBY</span>ites and market-force people look stupid.</p>

<p>Smart-city devotees all over this world will agree that London is particularly smart. Why? London is a huge, ungainly beast whose cartwheeling urban life is in cranky, irrational disarray. London is a god-awful urban mess, but London does have some of the best international smart-city conferences.</p>

<p>London also has a large urban-management bureaucracy who emit the proper smart-city buzzwords and have even invented some themselves.  The language of Smart City is always Global Business English, no matter what town you're in.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Case Against Reality</h3>
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        <p class="dek">A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.</p>
        
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            <p>As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.</p>
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">When Deplorability Is No Longer a Dealbreaker</h3>
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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-13T17:18:58" />
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        <p class="dek">A case study in the political right’s capitulation to Trump, and the threat it poses to its political future.</p>
        
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            <p>Last month, Mollie Hemingway, the Fox News contributor and senior editor at <em>The Federalist</em>, declared herself a Donald Trump supporter for the first time. “I wasn’t a Trump supporter,” the headline of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wasnt-a-trump-supporter-i-am-now/2018/01/19/58abd43a-fca2-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?utm_term=.fd413a319354">her <em>Washington Post</em> op-ed </a>stated.<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wasnt-a-trump-supporter-i-am-now/2018/01/19/58abd43a-fca2-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?utm_term=.fd413a319354"> </a>“I am now.”</p>

<p>She cited his actions on judicial nominees, climate policy, regulatory reform, tax cuts, guidelines on how colleges should adjudicate sexual assault, and foreign policy.</p>

<p>Large swaths of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have now reconciled themselves to supporting President Trump, including figures far more famous, powerful, and influential than any journalist. A strong case could be made that this particular endorsement didn’t really change anything, especially since its author was already openly anti-anti-Trump in her orientation.</p>


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                <figcaption class="credit">© Tobias Friedrich / UPY2018</figcaption>
                
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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Winners of the 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/alan-taylor/" itemprop="url" title="Alan Taylor" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Alan Taylor</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">The organizers of the Underwater Photographer of the Year have just announced the winning photographers and images for 2018.</p>
        
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            <p>Organizers of the <a href="http://www.underwaterphotographeroftheyear.com/">Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest</a> have just announced the winning photographers and images for 2018, with German photographer Tobias Friedrich being named Underwater Photographer of the Year 2018. More than 5,000 images were submitted this year by photographers from around the world. Prizes and commendations were handed out in a number of categories including Wide Angle, Macro, Wrecks, Behavior, Portrait, Black &amp; White, Compact, Up &amp; Coming, and, in British waters, Wide Angle, Compact, and Macro shots. UPY was once again kind enough to share some of this year's honorees with us below, with captions written by the photographers.</p>

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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Syria's War Is Fueling Three More Conflicts</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/krishnadev-calamur/" itemprop="url" title="Krishnadev Calamur" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Krishnadev Calamur</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-13T16:09:18" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">The grim post-ISIS future</p>
        
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            <p>When an Israeli jet crashed after being shot down over Syria over the weekend, it marked a serious escalation in the Syrian Civil War. But it also reflected an ongoing reality, one that is growing more dangerous: Syria’s war encompasses at least three other international conflicts, each of which are heating up.</p>

<p>In the last few weeks alone, Turkey has clashed with Syrian Kurds and threatened a U.S.-controlled town in Syria; an Israeli fighter jet that was part of a response to an incursion into Israeli territory by an Iranian drone launched from Syria <a href="https://www.idf.il/en/minisites/israeli-air-force/air-force-strikes-iranian-targets-in-syria/">took Syrian anti-aircraft fire</a>, forcing its two pilots to eject and parachute into Israeli territory; and U.S. forces repelled an attack by Russian fighters, killing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria-dead.html?action=click&amp;contentCollection=Middle%20East&amp;module=Trending&amp;version=Full&amp;region=Marginalia&amp;pgtype=article">an unknown number of them</a> that <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/u-s-strikes-said-to-kill-scores-of-russian-fighters-in-syria">reports</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria-dead.html">suggest</a> could be in the hundreds.   </p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Big-City Life on Very Little Water</h3>
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        <p class="dek">In Cape Town, people are restricted to just a fraction of the typical amount of water. From showering in buckets to special pee spray, here’s how they’re coping.</p>
        
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            <p>CAPE TOWN, South Africa—I was warned right away, at the airport: “We have a water crisis with severe restrictions in place,” read a Buick-sized sign in the arrivals area.</p>

<p>So it was true. I had spent the past week in South Africa on a reporting trip and had decided to pass through Cape Town on my way back, in part out of curiosity about the water shortage. The news coverage sounded scary: Because of a historic drought, the city was nearly out of water. In June, taps are set to run dry—an event referred to, menacingly, as “Day Zero.” If it comes, people will be forced to queue for a daily ration of water from guarded collection points around the city.</p>

<p>It seemed too nightmarish to be plausible. I spent a few months in Cape Town during the southern hemisphere’s wintertime in 2010. I remembered the place as being both relatively well managed—the country hosted the World Cup while I was there—and, well, pretty rainy.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?</h3>
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        <p class="dek">More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.</p>
        
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            <p class="dropcap">O<span class="smallcaps">ne day </span>last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”</p>

<p>Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue</h3>
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        <p class="dek">Americans would be less alienated from one another and solve problems more easily if they recognized one little-noticed distinction in policy debates.</p>
        
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            <p>We sometimes think of political issues in binary terms. Is someone pro-life or pro-choice? But most individuals hold views that are more complicated than a binary can capture.</p>

<p>An alternative is to describe a given position on a spectrum. On abortion, an outright ban sits at one extreme; at the other is the elimination of all restrictions on the procedure. In between are a staggering array of coherently distinguishable positions.</p>

<p>Politicians seeking to win votes express their stances either in terms of a binary or as a spot on a spectrum, depending on where they see the greatest advantage. Though their beliefs don’t change, how they frame them makes a political difference.</p>

<p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p>

<p>There’s a different set of frames, though, that are as relevant as binaries and spectrums, though they are less familiar and less discussed: equilibriums and limits.</p>


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