Fire Ants Are as Bad as People Say They Are
They are the spawn of Satan, and nothing can convince me otherwise
It was supposed to be a simple trip to Target. We were still waiting to close on our house and we needed school supplies. Going shopping was one of the only ways we could beat the southeast Texas heat before we settled back into our 32-foot trailer at an RV park. We were properly attired for the weather, settling into a six-year routine of wearing flip-flops and sandals for nine months out of the year. As the rest of us exited the car, our six-year-old daughter decided to settle herself under a tree in the parking lot, looking for a sliver of shade that would protect her from the hot sun. Then we all heard a blood-curdling scream.
My husband Jeff got to her first, and by the time I got to them with our four-year-old, he was frantically swiping dozens of ants off of her feet, which were already developing little red welts. Our first stop inside Target was the first-aid and allergy aisles, grabbing everything we could to alleviate our little girl’s pain.
There is no other way to say it: fire ants suck.
It was one of the first big adjustments our family had to make when we moved to Texas. After years of walking barefoot across grass, lying down to look at the clouds, and seeing ants in the kitchen as an annoyance to be eliminated with Terro, we suddenly viewed every ant mound with suspicion. Even when the weather called for lighter footwear, I would wear tennis shoes if I knew that I was going to be walking across grass. I didn’t take shortcuts, preferring the safety of sidewalks where I could see the mounds of ants growing in the cracks in plain sight.
And I did this with good reason. When we took our first spring break Texas trip to the Texas/Louisiana border, I got two rogue ants in a flip-flop and spent the rest of the trip scratching at the painful itch that formed on my feet, which was why I had my dear husband wake up the mound of ants in the video we took at our campsite when we returned home from a day of exploring.
But then a couple of years later, I had a big scare after being bit by a pair of fire ants. I had gone for an early run and then decided to work on the landscaping in the backyard before it got too hot. Already overheated from the run and with an increased heart rate due to the continued yard work, I noticed a tingling in my feet shortly after I got bit on the wrist by two ants that had found their way to my shovel. Then I started to itch underneath my armpits. While Jeff, completely unaware of my situation, kept mowing the lawn, I ran upstairs to take a shower, only to discover that I was now covered in hives. I screamed for our son (seriously scaring him) to get Jeff’s attention. We found Benadryl, Jeff helped me get dressed, and then he rushed me to urgent care, where I got a steroid shot for an allergic reaction to a fire ant bite.1
Apparently, you can get bit several times before having an allergic reaction, and the doctor figured it was a combination of factors that caused my body to react as it did, but that didn’t soothe our nerves every time I saw a mound.
Needless to say, we proceeded with extreme caution after that experience, my family working overtime to help me avoid every mound that they saw.
It wasn’t the last time I experienced a fire ant bite, but it was the last time I had that severe of a reaction. The two to three times it happened after that first experience, I immediately took Benadryl and lied down as soon as possible. The scariest was when I got bit in the days following Hurricane Harvey, the flooding bringing all the ants to the surface. The floodwaters weren’t just dangerous because of the toxic materials, water moccasins, and rogue alligators; they were also teeming with floating islands of fire ants ready to attack anyone who dared to walk in the waters without proper flood gear. And then the ants swarmed everywhere after the floodwaters receeded while they looked for new places to build their mounds.
We developed a healthy fear of the little monsters. When I went to Costa Rica for spring break in 2020, my awareness that bullet ants were even worse than fire ants kept me from holding onto the railing of a suspended bridge after my travel partner informed me that they liked to use railings as a kind of highway to travel the rain forest. The last thing I wanted was for my students to see me collapse from a horrific allergic reaction to an ant bite.
I made my feelings about them very clear when we returned to Texas for spring break in 2023 as I spent several days carefully differentiating between Gulf Coast sand along the beach and deadly fire ant mounds.
There are plenty of things that we were sad to leave when we moved back to the Midwest, but fire ants are not included in that list. I love being able to walk in our grass without fear of dying because I stepped on a mound of swarming ants. I keep hoping that this invasive species that has taken over the south won’t make it further north, but with word that they have now been discovered in Europe, I don’t hold out a lot of hope, except that the extreme cold will continue to keep them far away.
And this TikTok from James Van Der Beek pretty much says it all.
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That was the day we decided we were paying for people to do our yard work and we never regretted it.
I read somewhere that ants have no blood in their bodies.
Sarah, ain't it the truth, haha. They are evil, swarming, little bastards. I'll bet the other types of ants hate them too. Don't forget scorpions and copperheads! Some years the copperhead population just seems to explode. All of that is just part of being here though and I still wouldn't live anywhere else. Enjoyed this very much. - Jim