Ants.

I hate ants. I always have. In junior high at lunch one day, I was sitting on the blacktop curb with my friend talking, and at the end of lunch we looked down (we'd been staring up at the mountain/hill the whole time) and found we were covered in ants. It took me an hour to brush them out of my hair. I didn't even go to class.


And we didn't even know until we looked down! You don't feel them at all! And they aren't like other insects... I dislike spiders, yes, but generally there's only one of them at a time. Ants just keep coming and coming in thousands!


My great irrational fear is that they will cover me and get inside my orifices (my mouth, nose, ears, and other places) and eat me from the inside. That scene in the latest Indiana Jones movie? I was screaming in the movie theater. I couldn't help it. I could not stop screaming for the entire scene, as much as I tried. If you haven't seen it, the scene is comprised of massive killer ants in the jungle coming from everywhere, covering everything, and just completely ripping through humans, tearing them apart limb from limb (here is an image gallery with screenshots of the scene). The embodiment of my greatest fear.



Yes, that is a massive swarm of ants underneath her.

Which brings me to this lovely article I read today on Cracked.com: 6 Reasons We Should Be Way More Scared Of Ants.



Like many of you, I was not previously aware of Argentine ants. This article is well worth a read.

You might be thinking, Hey, no big deal, I'll just step on them, like I do to other things that are smaller than me. They're just ants, like any other ants. But they're not. Argentine ants are special. Special and evil and powerful. They will wait for you to go to sleep, then climb on your face and bite you, (yes, that is a thing they do).They're coming for your family by way of your nightmares and they need to be stopped.

Basically, as their name indicates, these ants originated in Argentina, where they were previously kept in check by wars with other species of ants. In the past 100 years, however, they have made their way around the globe, via us, and are now messing with the ecosystems, putting several species in danger of extinction. 

Unlike other ants, they don't fight among colonies; when one colony encounters another, they just join forces. This has created a super colony in Europe that covers 3,700 miles. And that's not the worst part.

While supercolonies aren't specific to Argentine ants, Global "mega-colonies" are. In 2009, Insectes Sociaux reported that three different supercolonies -- one in America, one in Europe and one in Japan -- were actually different branches of the same colony. Scientists gathered these ants from all over the world and put them together, and whenever they got near each other, they "recognize[d] each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles" and started "rubbing antennae together."

And according to this pest control website, regular poison does not work on them! "Do not spray any repellent spray pesticides around Argentine Ants. Spraying will not kill the queens but will increase the egg laying and will only compound the problem." ;A;

I'm so freaked out! I keep imagining that I'm feeling them crawling all over me! I'm going to have nightmares for a week! We need to do something about this awful breed of ant!