Ants

Fire ants are making a comeback in Orange County, years after being nearly eradicated from the area, pest-control authorities report. Recent findings indicate the ants, named for the fiery sting of their bite, are expanding their range along county borders. The red ants had been kept largely under control within the county because of a homeowner fee approved by voters to pay for local ant control.

Solved: the mystery of how the ants go marching home. With nothing but a featureless expanse of sand around them, Saharan desert ants can still calculate the distance to their nest. Now German scientists have figured out that they use a sophisticated internal pedometer. The ants take a meandering route from their nest in search of food, but when home beckons, they are able to figure the most direct route back.

Hoping to trigger an ant civil war, UC Irvine scientists are experimenting with a colorless potion that makes bosom-buddy arthropods try to decapitate one another. The research, announced Thursday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco, could help rein in one of the planet's most troublesome pests: the Argentine ant.

Studying ants is "like being 9 years old again," said Neil Tsutsui, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Irvine. A few facts about the Argentine ants held in captivity inside UCI's climate-controlled ant vault: * The scent secreted by the ants can't be detected by humans. But some other ant species smell like blue cheese or citronella. * The UCI ants feast on scrambled eggs, dead crickets and sugar water.

You hit the target when you advised using window cleaner to kill ant trail scents ["Honey, We Have Company," Aug. 6]. Another great deterrent is mint mouthwash, which will not only kill the scent trail but all ants in the vicinity. Lavender and vanilla scents also work as repellents. SYLVIA MOISE \o7Lake Elsinore \f7

Ants took up farming some 50 million years ago, according to researchers who traced the ancestry of farmer ants. An analysis of the DNA of farmer ants traced them back to an original ancestor -- a sort of Adam ant, at least for the types that raise their own food, according to a paper published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the last 25 million years, ants have developed different types of farming, including the well-known leaf-cutter ants.

In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers. The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy Rasberry ants" -- crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "Rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who battled them early on. The ants -- formally known as "paratrenicha species near pubens" -- have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

To the writers of last week's "Underrated" column: Thanks for tipping me off to mtvmusic.com. There's quite an extensive library of classic videos there. But there's just one problem: You won't be annoying your office mates with an Adam & the Ants marathon, because the website has only one Adam & the Ants video, "Stand & Deliver." Chuck Zaremba Oceanside

After reading in Valli Herman's story ["Hot Colors, Cool Views," Sept. 13] that "it took more than an hour and several phone calls to have my ant-bait breakfast tray removed," I now realize why I so often see that most unappetizing sight in hotel hallways: meal trays sitting on the carpet outside the door. Disgusting! Kyle Kimbrell Playa del Rey

Not long after Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World, hordes of viciously stinging ants assailed the island of Hispaniola, pouring into homes and ravaging the Spanish colonists' newly planted crops of oranges, pomegranates and cassia trees. People had to place the legs of their beds in containers of water to avoid being covered in ants during the night. Two centuries later, a different plague of ants laid waste sugar plantations in the islands of Martinique, Barbados and Grenada.