So many ants the ground moves ... just a few miles from the Lowcountry

There’s a wooded area — at the Port of Savannah — where the ground, if you look at it long enough, seems to move.

“It’s a jungle,” Dan Suiter, an urban entomologist at the University of Georgia, said Thursday. “The only way you would know you were on the port is the sounds of commerce around you.”

Trucks beeping. Cranes unloading containers. The rumble of machinery filters through the thick, mosquito-infested air.

And underfoot, working silently in the woods, is another machine — a natural force, if not a native one.

The tawny crazy ant — a fast-multiplying, aggressive species known for infesting electrical equipment.

Suiter, whose specialty is ants, doesn’t know the total size of the population at the port. He and his team surveyed “three or four” acres and estimated there were 5,000 ants per square meter. “In this one plot, it had to be in the tens of millions,” he said.

It’s only a matter of time, experts say, before the ant makes its way to South Carolina. Native to South America, it’s moved from place to place by people. Currently, it has not been documented in the Palmetto State, but it’s at our doorstep.

Here are five things you need to know about the tawny crazy ant.

1. It does bite; it can’t sting; it will irritate you

“They can bite,” Suiter said, explaining they can’t sting, like fire ants can.

“I’ve been bitten by them before,” he said. “A bite ... it’s a pinch, but not painful like a fire ant.”

David Bowers, a graduate student at Clemson University who’s studying the ant, has toured the port property with Suiter.

“It’s a very small ant,” Bowers said. “You don’t necessarily see it until you get kind of close. ... It’s almost if you could just imagine every surface (of the forest) being covered. They’re climbing up your leg, they’re on every surface.”

When the ant climbs on you, Bowers said, it can irritate your skin because it secretes formic acid — the substance that, according to Scientific American, acts as a defensive shield against fire ants’ venom.

2. Tawny crazy ants will steal fire ants’ pecan sandies

In June, Suiter found a “sunny, grassy area” on the port and, to assess the ant population, put out some bait — a pecan sandies cookie.

“(Ants) love pecan sandies,” he said. “The sugar, the fat, the oil — most people who do ant research use pecan sandies.”

When he put out the bait, tawny crazy ants swarmed to it. Two years earlier, when he’d put a cookie in the same spot, fire ants had claimed the sweet treat.

He recently placed a cookie five feet from a fire ant mound.

Still, the tawny crazy ants claimed it.

They’ll attack the fire ants, Suiter said, adding that he’s seen video footage of tawny crazy ants dismembering fire ant queens.

3. No, they’re not really crazy

Tawny crazy ants — also called Rasberry ants, after the Texas exterminator who discovered them — are members of the larger crazy ant clan.

“The fact that they have very erratic movements, running around wildly with no rhyme or reason — it’s the appearance,” Pat Zungoli, an entomology professor at Clemson, said.

“But of course these are ants,” she continued. “While it might look crazy to us, believe me, it is not crazy to them.”

Tawny crazy ants spread with the assistance of people, and they reproduce in such large numbers that they overwhelm other invasive species, such as fire ants.

Fire ants, a species that reproduces by swarming — flying — tend to advance into new areas in a wave; their movement can be mapped almost like a weather front, Suiter said.

But tawny crazy ants don’t swarm. They appear on a map as splotches, he said.

They might hitch a ride in grandma’s favorite potted plant, he said, when you move her to Beaufort from Texas.

4. Want an ant farm? Just leave a bunch of stuff in your yard

Any attempt to control or contain a crazy ant population will require a “multi-faceted approach,” Zungoli said.

That means a slow-acting pesticide, a liquid pesticide and most important, in Bowers’ and Suiter’s opinion, an effort to make habitats less attractive to them.

So, clean up your trash piles. Remove downed limbs and logs. Clear leaves from your yard. The grass clippings, too. Keep in mind they like mulch and pine straw.

“They’ve been found under concrete birdbaths,” Bowers said. “They’ve been documented nesting in cars.”

5. We’ll find out they’re here (too late)

When they arrive in Lowcountry, they’ll be undetectable at first, Suiter said.

But they’ll multiply, maybe during the course of a year. Then, a homeowner might notice them and call an exterminator. That exterminator might call a county extension agent or a university professor to identify the species.

“The likelihood of eradication at that point is not good,” Suiter said.

A proper identification of the species is critical.

“There are over 15,000 species of ants worldwide,” Suiter said. “When (laymen) see something, (they) don’t know what it is, really.

“So, send it to someone who does.”

This story was originally published July 29, 2016 at 9:41 AM with the headline "So many ants the ground moves ... just a few miles from the Lowcountry."