Texas

Crazy Ants are Insane

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I meant to highlight this fascinating piece in The New York Times earlier, but better late than never.

First, the name:

The ants are called crazy ants. That’s their actual name. Many people call them Rasberry crazy ants, and some people call them Tawny crazy ants and refuse to call them Rasberry crazy ants. 

Rasberry coming from not a scientist or a professor, but an exterminator who noticed these wild ants in Texas.

Rasberry crazy ants do not have a painful bite, but they effectively terrorize people by racing up their feet and around their bodies, coursing everywhere in their impossibly disordered orbits. (They’re called crazy ants because their behavior seems psychotic.) Some people in Texas have become so frustrated with crazy ants that they have considered selling their houses or been driven to the verge of divorce. “Usually, the husband doesn’t think it’s such a big deal, and the wife is going batty,” one exterminator explained. An attorney living on an infested farm south of Houston told me: “It reminds me of the scenes in Africa, where you see flies crawling all over people. Occasionally they’ll knock one off, but for the most part they’re so accustomed to it that they finally give up.”

Crazy ants decimate native insects. They overtake beehives and destroy the colonies. They may smother bird chicks struggling to hatch. In South America, where scientists now believe the ants originated, they have been known to obstruct the nasal cavities of chickens and asphyxiate the birds. They swarm into cows’ eyes.

So far, there is no way to contain them. In the fall, when the temperature drops, the worker ants are subject to magnificent die-offs, but the queens survive, and a new, often larger crop of crazy ants pours back in the following spring. Rasberry crazy ants were first discovered in Texas by an exterminator in 2002. Within five years, they appeared to be spreading through the state much faster than even the red imported fire ant has. The fire ant is generally considered one of the worst invasive species in the world. The cost of fire ants to Texas has been estimated at more than $1 billion a year.

Here is a three-year old video that shows how fast these crazy ants scurry about:

 

Definitely worth reading the entire thing. Fascinating reporting. And scary how species can be so invasive!

The Influence of Texas on Textbooks

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What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks. That’s the premise of this New York Review of Books piece on the Texas School of Education and its politics. It’s a good piece which highlights a broken system:

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

And:

The Texas State Board of Education, which approves textbooks, curriculum standards, and supplemental materials for the public schools, has fifteen members from fifteen districts whose boundaries don’t conform to congressional districts, or really anything whatsoever. They run in staggered elections that are frequently held in off years, when always-low Texas turnout is particularly abysmal. The advantage tends to go to candidates with passionate, if narrow, bands of supporters, particularly if those bands have rich backers. All of which—plus a natural supply of political eccentrics—helps explain how Texas once had a board member who believed that public schools are the tool of the devil.

An example of revisionist book writing:

For the most part, however, the board seemed determined just to sprinkle stuff its members liked hither and yon, and eliminate words they found objectionable in favor of more appealing ones. Reading through the deletions and additions, it becomes clear that a majority of board members hated the word “democratic,” for which they consistently substituted “constitutional republic.” They also really disliked “capitalism” (see rather: “free enterprise system”) and “natural law” (“laws of nature and nature’s God”).

The conclusion of the piece:

Texas certainly didn’t single-handedly mess up American textbooks, but its size, its purchasing heft, and the pickiness of the school board’s endless demands—not to mention the board’s overall craziness—certainly made it the trend leader.