What Are Crazy Ants?

The second secret weapon crazy ants have is sheer volume.

Crazy ants' connected colonies can form huge populations. Without natural competitors keeping them in check, in the U.S. they can "attain densities up to 100 times as great as all other ants in the area combined," according to Ed LeBrun of The University of Texas at Austin. As Scientific American reports, "Teeming out of electrical outlets and short-circuiting electronics, the tiny reddish-brown crazy ants have been making headlines as their numbers climb in the southeastern U.S. In some locales they can be so tightly packed together they are initially mistaken for dirt. Then they move."