There’s a Reason They Call Them ‘Crazy Ants’
By JON MOOALLEM, NYT
The first time Mike the Hog-a-Nator noticed the ants, they were piled outside his cardiologist’s office. This was two summers ago, in Pearland, a suburb of Houston. There was a forbidding, fibrous heap of dead ants on either side of the building’s double doors, each a couple of feet long. And there were also legions of living ants shuffling over the dead ones — though Mike the Hog-a-Nator had to bend down to see these. Otherwise, so many individual ants were moving so chaotically, and so fast, that the entire reddish-brown tangle at his feet looked as if it were shimmering. Mike the Hog-a-Nator remembers thinking: What the world? Then he went inside for his weekly appointment.
Six years earlier, a doctor found a tumor on Mike the Hog-a-Nator’s aorta. It was inoperable. Mike, who was only 36, was told to live every day as if it were his last. He narrowed his joys and priorities to two. The first was putting smiles on the faces of people who need them, so he started a program he calls Therapy Through the Outdoors. Ever since, he has been taking kids with terminal diseases and veterans with injuries or PTSD on adventures in the 60-acre woodland across from his house. The other was shooting as many feral hogs as he possibly could, which is what he and the sick kids and the wounded warriors often do in the woods.
Mike hates feral hogs, and has always found it very satisfying to clear those hideous, rooting thugs off a piece of land. He has always been good at it too — that’s why people call him Mike the Hog-a-Nator. (His real name is Mike Foshee.) Recently, he even started marketing his own all-natural hog bait, “Pork Smack™ Hog Attractant,” after months of refining the recipe. America has been filling up with invasive species since European settlers first arrived. Feral hogs, which were brought to the continent five centuries ago, are among the most gruesome and destructive. The federal government estimates that there are now five million hogs in 35 states, resulting in $1.5 billion in damages and control costs every year. In its literature, the Department of Agriculture calls the animals a “pandemic.”
But anyway, the ants.
(More here.)
The first time Mike the Hog-a-Nator noticed the ants, they were piled outside his cardiologist’s office. This was two summers ago, in Pearland, a suburb of Houston. There was a forbidding, fibrous heap of dead ants on either side of the building’s double doors, each a couple of feet long. And there were also legions of living ants shuffling over the dead ones — though Mike the Hog-a-Nator had to bend down to see these. Otherwise, so many individual ants were moving so chaotically, and so fast, that the entire reddish-brown tangle at his feet looked as if it were shimmering. Mike the Hog-a-Nator remembers thinking: What the world? Then he went inside for his weekly appointment.
Six years earlier, a doctor found a tumor on Mike the Hog-a-Nator’s aorta. It was inoperable. Mike, who was only 36, was told to live every day as if it were his last. He narrowed his joys and priorities to two. The first was putting smiles on the faces of people who need them, so he started a program he calls Therapy Through the Outdoors. Ever since, he has been taking kids with terminal diseases and veterans with injuries or PTSD on adventures in the 60-acre woodland across from his house. The other was shooting as many feral hogs as he possibly could, which is what he and the sick kids and the wounded warriors often do in the woods.
Mike hates feral hogs, and has always found it very satisfying to clear those hideous, rooting thugs off a piece of land. He has always been good at it too — that’s why people call him Mike the Hog-a-Nator. (His real name is Mike Foshee.) Recently, he even started marketing his own all-natural hog bait, “Pork Smack™ Hog Attractant,” after months of refining the recipe. America has been filling up with invasive species since European settlers first arrived. Feral hogs, which were brought to the continent five centuries ago, are among the most gruesome and destructive. The federal government estimates that there are now five million hogs in 35 states, resulting in $1.5 billion in damages and control costs every year. In its literature, the Department of Agriculture calls the animals a “pandemic.”
But anyway, the ants.
(More here.)
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