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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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            <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">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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        <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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<p>That’s not to say Gates is pessimistic about the future. His and Melinda Gates’s tenth annual letter, <a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/2018-Annual-Letter">released</a> Tuesday, is otherwise sunny in its global outlook. Even after 2017, when 59 percent of Americans <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2017/state-nation.pdf">told</a> the APA they were currently living through the lowest point in the nation’s history, the couple wrote that “we see a world that’s getting better.”</p>

<p>But as Gates stressed to Goldberg, the modern world still faces serious threats, especially those that transcend geopolitical borders. “We have more connectivity working against us,” he said. And because of this connectivity, Gates fears a new global pandemic. More spending on global health could avert such a crisis, but a dip in public-health spending could hasten catastrophe.</p>


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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">The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous</h3>
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    <ul class="metadata">
        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/gabrielle-glaser/" itemprop="url" title="Gabrielle Glaser" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">Gabrielle Glaser</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <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>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <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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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">What It Takes to Actually Convict Police of Misconduct</h3>
    </a>
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        <li class="byline"><span itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a href="/author/david-a-graham/" itemprop="url" title="David A. Graham" data-omni-click="inherit"><span itemprop="name">David A. Graham</span></a></span></li>
        

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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">Officers involved in fatal incidents keep getting acquitted, but a team of Baltimore cops who stole from suspects and taxpayers alike during a years-long criminal spree are facing serious jail time.</p>
        
        <div class="excerpt">
            <p>Something amazing happened over the course of a recent trial in Baltimore: Witnesses laid out the way that the city’s Gun Trace Task Force <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/baltimore-gun-trace-task-force-abuses/551663/">acted as a de facto criminal gang</a>, but with the advantages of a police badge and the power of the state. Officers assigned to the unit robbed hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug dealers, pocketing the money. They targeted cars for searches based on makes and models, and stopped adult black men just for carrying backpacks. They drove at groups of men and detained anyone who ran. They bilked taxpayers by charging for fraudulent overtime.</p>

<p>On Monday, something even more amazing happened. Two officers were <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gttf-verdict-20180208-story.html">convicted</a> of racketeering and robbery charges in federal court. They joined six others who had already pleaded guilty. Stories of police misconduct have become bracingly common in recent years, but convictions have remained rare. The failure to convict any Baltimore officer in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray is the obvious contrast, but similar cases all over the country, from Tamir Rice to Eric Garner to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/footage-of-a-police-killing-that-jurors-didnt-punish/547868/">Daniel Shaver</a>, have also ended without convictions.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">Russia's Air Industry Is a Victim of Its Own Success</h3>
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        <p class="dek">As more people choose to fly, the country’s airliners are having a tougher time finding qualified personnel.</p>
        
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            <p>Four minutes after taking off from Moscow on Sunday afternoon, a Saratov Airlines Antonov An-148 headed for Orsk plummeted <a href="https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/962668550715510784/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rferl.org%2Fa%2Frussia-saratov-airlines-passenger-jet-disappears-from-radar-crash-update%2F29033328.html">6,000 feet</a> into the ground, killing all 71 one people on board. In the aftermath, the images that appeared on television were all too familiar. Jagged metal scattered in a snowy field. Trees ripped apart, debris hanging from their branches. Police lines and disconsolate relatives. Roses placed beneath the departures screen at Moscow's Domodedovo airport.</p>

<p>On Monday, Russia's investigative committee said that the plane had not broken up or caught fire before it dropped from the sky, and that an “explosion occurred after the plane fell.” The crash site was relatively compact. All this suggested that the latest tragedy was not due to terrorism, unlike the two planes brought down by suicide bombers in 2004, or the 2015 Sharm El Sheikh disaster. Instead, the investigative committee said it suspected the “airline's activities, the technical condition of the aircraft, the level of the pilots' professional preparedness, [and] whether they underwent the necessary training.” If a poorly trained crew was the cause, it wouldn't be the first time.</p>


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        <h3 class="hed" itemprop="headline">The Fetishization of Kim Yo Jong</h3>
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    <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-02-12T18:08:38" />
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    <div itemprop="description" class="article-content ">
        <p class="dek">A dictator’s sister gets positive reviews at the Olympics.</p>
        
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            <p>Call it the diplomacy of low expectations: After Kim Jong Un’s regime spent much of the past year threatening its neighbors and the U.S. with its nuclear weapons, his sister got a surprisingly warm reception at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. And North Korea—having sent athletes and cheerleaders to the Games as well—got the kind of publicity that should have been reserved for South Korea, which organized, paid for, and is hosting event.</p>

<p>Here are some of the recent headlines:</p>

<p><a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2018-northkorea-diplomacy-an/north-korea-heads-for-diplomacy-gold-medal-at-olympics-analysts-idUKKBN1FV0JV">North Korea heads for diplomacy gold medal at Olympics: analysts</a> (Reuters)</p>

<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/world/asia/kim-yo-jong-mike-pence-olympics.html">Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns On the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight</a> (<em>The New York Times</em>)</p>

<p><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/winter-olympics-2018/2018/02/11/north-korea-cheerleaders-bring-feeling-home-winter-olympics-e/327122002/">North Korea cheerleaders making quite an impression at Winter Olympics</a> (<em>USA Today</em>)</p>


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