Fire Ant Fiasco

The fire ants first arrived in Mobile, Ala., in 1918, hidden in a cargo from their native Brazil. Now they infest at least 133 million acres in nine Southern states from Texas to North Carolina and are slowly spreading northward. They live in open areas (farm land, pastures, even lawns) where they build 3-ft-high mounds that hinder mowers, plows and other machinery. They swarm over farm animals or people who stumble over the mounds, stinging them viciously. The ants' venom, which can cause coma in allergic individuals, produces the painful burning sensation that gives the ants their name. Despite the undeniable menace of the fire ant, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz last month announced the end of his department's 13-year effort to control the insect.

Why? Butz blamed the Environmental Protection Agency, which had earlier imposed restrictions on the use of Mirex, a powerful anti-ant pesticide. Starting in 1962, the Agriculture Department had sprayed Mirex from airplanes two or three times annually on infested areas. But in 1972 tests showed that when Mirex was washed into estuaries and bays, it killed shellfish. Experiments at the National Cancer Institute also indicated that it might cause cancer in humans. So the EPA cut the permissible number of aerial sprayings to only one a year and in 1973 began investigations--which are still continuing --to determine just how dangerous Mirex really might be.

Abandoned Pastures. As Butz sees it, limiting Mirex to one application per year made the program "completely unworkable." Agricultural experts in the infested areas seem to agree. "The ants come back every year now," says Halwin Jones, an official in Florida's agriculture department. "It used to be three, four or five years before they'd return." In Lowndes County, Ga., Agent George Kessler reports that farmers this year have begun to abandon pastures to protect their animals from the ants and that "children are having to play inside at some kindergartens to avoid being stung." If the Agriculture Department could concentrate its sprayings, they imply, the ants would not only be controlled but eradicated.

The facts are more complicated. Every colony of fire ants can produce dozens of winged queens, each of which can fly miles to set up a new nest. Though an application of Mirex might kill 95% of the ants in an area, says EPA Entomologist Sam Fluker, "to get rid of that last 5% might take an additional 100 treatments." In fact, the battle against the ants has yielded so little and cost so much--$148 million in federal and state funds to date--that Harvard University Zoologist Edward O. Wilson calls it "the Viet Nam of entomology."

For all its deficiencies, Mirex so far is the only practical weapon that has had any effect on the fire ant. Some EPA officials suspect that Butz canceled the program to dramatize what he considers unnecessarily tough EPA restrictions on many different pesticides. At week's end officials of both federal bureaucracies were trying to work out a compromise. They are convinced that they can at least slow the march of the fire ants, which could eventually infest an area extending as far north as southern New Jersey and all the way west to Washington state.

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