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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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        <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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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Abraham Lincoln's Secret Visits to Slaves</h3>
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        <p class="dek">In the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed thousands of former slaves, some of whom claimed the president came to their plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free.</p>
        
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            <p>Shortly before the election of 1860, a man <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.130/?sp=231">came upon</a> a plantation near Marlin, Texas, some 20 miles southeast of Waco. Though nobody knew who he was, the plantation owner took him in as a guest. The stranger paid close attention to how the enslaved people working on the plantation were treated—how they subsisted on a weekly ration of “four pounds of meat and a peck of meal,” how they were whipped and sometimes sold, resulting in the tearing apart of families. Eventually, the stranger said goodbye and went on his way, but a little while later he wrote a letter to the plantation owner, informing him he would soon have to free his slaves—“that everybody was going to have to, that the North was going to see to it.” The stranger told the owner to go into the room where he’d slept, and see where he’d carved his name into the headrest. And when the slaveholder went and looked, he saw the name: “A. Lincoln.”</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Congressional Stalemate Over Guns and Immigration Isn't Going Away</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/ronald-brownstein/" itemprop="url" title="Ronald Brownstein" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Ronald Brownstein</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">It's the result of cultural, demographic, and economic divides that are only going to grow.</p>
        
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            <p>The dim odds that Congress will respond to the Parkland school massacre with meaningful gun control and the flickering prospects it will pass immigration reform both reflect the same obstacle: the widening trench between the forces of transformation and restoration in American politics.</p>

<p>The convergence of the two policy debates today—with the nation reeling from Wednesday’s shooting in Florida and the Senate voting down an array of proposals on immigration—is coincidental but revealing. Both issues illuminate the central divide between the parties as their political coalitions have sorted and separated along lines of race, generation, education, and geography. On both matters, Republicans are championing primarily non-urban and predominantly white constituencies that want fewer immigrants and more access to guns. Democrats reflect a mirror-image consensus: Their voters coming from diverse urban areas usually support more immigrants and fewer guns.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Trump Is Looking in the Wrong Direction to Prevent Mass Shootings</h3>
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        <p class="dek">The president called for increased vigilance on Thursday, but even when authorities know about troubled individuals that often isn’t enough to prevent massacres.</p>
        
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            <p>In the aftermath of a mass shooting, hindsight kicks in quickly. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, or teachers are often able to pinpoint moments where they realized something was wrong with the perpetrator, or simply felt uncomfortable. President Trump picked up on this idea of warning signs in a tweet Thursday morning, responding to the killing of 17 in Parkland, Florida, the day before:</p>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!</p>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964110212885106689?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 15, 2018</a></blockquote>
<p>With the prospects for changes to gun laws and regulations effectively frozen at the national level, the debate after shootings has often gravitated toward similar lines of discussion, often centered around mental health. Since there’s little prospect of regulating the weapons used in the shootings, the focus is on intervening before the point when someone opens fire. Yet this line of thinking is flawed, both practically and philosophically.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Once and Future Speaker?</h3>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/russell-berman/" itemprop="url" title="Russell Berman" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Russell Berman</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Is Nancy Pelosi's leadership the key to Democrats regaining the House, or the thing that will hold them back?</p>
        
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            <p class="dropcap">H<span class="smallcaps">ere,”</span> Nancy Pelosi likes to say, “the currency of the realm is the vote.”</p>

<p>With a majority of the votes in Congress, you have power. Without them, you have nothing. Pelosi, the House minority leader, knows it as well as anyone in Washington. She had the votes to make history in 2007 when she became speaker of the House, not only becoming the first woman to hold that title but in the process, rising higher in U.S. electoral politics—and closer in the line of presidential succession—than any woman before or since. Four years later, the votes were gone, washed away in a Republican wave that relegated Democrats back to the minority. Now, with Democrats poised to make a run at recapturing the House majority this fall, Pelosi has a chance to set another mark: the first person to reclaim the speaker’s gavel in more than 60 years and the first ever to do so after so long an interval.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What's Actually Behind Cape Town's Water Crisis</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/richard-poplak/" itemprop="url" title="Richard Poplak" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Richard Poplak</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">Blame austerity-obsessed technocrats, irresponsible development, and willful ignorance.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>The city of Cape Town was plonked by its founders onto a peninsula where the Indian and Atlantic oceans merge, often violently, beneath the imposing banks of Table Mountain. To its north lie the fertile fruit and wine farms that weigh down the city’s restaurant tables with unimaginable bounty. Every day when the clock strikes noon, a cannon blast echoes from Signal Hill, a reminder of the city’s colonial heritage. It was established first as a vegetable garden by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, then repurposed as a stronghold for the British until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910; later it served as the apartheid regime’s parliamentary stronghold. In 2014, The <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/01/10/travel/2014-places-to-go.html">declared it</a> the best place in the world to visit. Britain’s <em>Daily Telegraph</em> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africa/south-africa/galleries/reasons-why-cape-town-is-the-best-city-in-the-world/">concurred</a>.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">If Porn Could Be Banned, Why Not AR-15s?</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/james-hamblin/" itemprop="url" title="James Hamblin" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">James Hamblin</span></a></span></li>
        

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        <p class="dek">People willing to discuss regulations on sex-related media should conceivably be open to discussing further regulation of firearms.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Pornography is officially a “public-health crisis” in Utah, according to 2016 legislation. The Republican representative Todd Weiler, who championed the bill and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/a-crisis-of-education/478206/">told me</a> at the time that he sees a lot of porn in his Twitter feed, has been working to make it illegal for internet service providers to provide internet that contains porn.</p>

<p>When I covered this story it felt like a fringe movement, born of conflicting ideas about the role of government in public health. Banning porn means expanding government oversight in a way that infringes on personal liberties and squelches an enormous industry that creates wealth and jobs. These tenets seem contrary to many conservatives’ stated objectives and free-market approach, yet it was conservatives beating the drum.</p>


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        <p class="dek">An investigation into a surprisingly divisive question</p>
        
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            <p dir="ltr">It seemed like an easy question.</p>

<p dir="ltr">The query came from <a href="https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/961700363131908096">a Twitter poll</a> I spotted on my news feed last week, from user @cgpgrey. “Please help resolve a marital dispute,” @cgpgrey wrote. “You would describe the color of a tennis ball as:” green, yellow, or other.</p>

<p dir="ltr"><em>Yellow, obviously</em>, I thought, and voted. When the results appeared, my jaw dropped with cartoonish effect. Of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.”</p>

<p dir="ltr">I was stunned. I’d gone from being so sure of myself to second-guessing my sanity in a matter of seconds. More than that, I could never have imagined the question of the color of a tennis ball—surely something we could all agree on, even in these times—would be so divisive.</p>


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            <p><em>On Monday, </em>The Atlantic<em> contributing editor Jeffrey Rosen spoke at length with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the National Constitution Center, where Rosen is president and CEO. In a wide-ranging conversation before a live audience, Ginsburg offered a supportive critique of the #MeToo movement, confessed her affection for Millennials, discussed the Supreme Court cases she’d like to see overturned, and told some personal stories about the progress women’s rights have made—while reminding the audience of just how recently gender discrimination in American law seemed not only normal but entrenched. What follows is a condensed and edited version of their conversation. —Adam Serwer</em></p>

<hr><p><strong>Jeffrey Rosen:</strong> What are your thoughts on the #MeToo movement and will it prove lasting progress for women’s equality?</p>


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<p>This something may or may not have been a sonic attack. It may or may not have been deployed by Cubans, Russians, Venezuelans, or any other country with whom the United States has beef. A detailed new accounting of the affair <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/diplomats-in-cuba">appeared</a> in <em>ProPublica</em>, the investigative news outlet, Wednesday. After talking with three dozen officials in different countries and looking at what were described as “confidential government documents,” the reporting confirms that no one has any idea what happened in Havana.</p>

<p>The facts of the case, so far as <em>ProPublica</em> has been able to suss out, are as follows: In November of 2016, an American official newly arrived in Havana with his family heard a strange, loud noise. Something like cicadas or insects, but really loud, and perhaps too “mechanical-sounding.” In December, a young man experienced the same thing—and began to suffer serious symptoms. These two people discussed their experiences of the sound in March. Shortly thereafter, the older diplomat and his wife began to receive medical attention for hearing loss and other problems.</p>


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