With help from its Environmental Studies Program, we're produced at the Whitaker Center at Florida Gulf Coast University and funded by the Southwest Florida Council for Environment Education. I'm Kevin Pierce with the Florida Environment. While the burn of a Fire Ant sting is what most of us know about the invasive insect that came here from South America, there is impact as well on non-human targets. When you have large numbers of Fire Ants, you're going to have few spiders, few other arthropods, few other ants. So they do impact heavily on other organisms in large populations of Fire Ants.
Economic loss is created by the Fire Ant in some agricultural situations.
They benefit the production for example in cotton and sugarcane and a few other crops. They control various kinds of pests so that the farmer has to spend less money on pesticide. With help from its Environmental Studies Program, we're produced at the Whitaker Center at Florida Gulf Coast University and funded by the Southwest Florida Council for Environment Education. I'm Kevin Pierce with the Florida Environment. While most retail remedies for pesty Fire Ants are temporary, scientists have found a more permanent control, by visiting the ants' South American homeland.