Fire ants are no friend to agriculture.
On their march through the South, the destructive insects have ruined soybean crops, chewed up potatoes and strawberries, stung livestock, and even damaged rural roads and farm machinery. Now the pesky insect invaders have spread into southern Tennessee. And a team of UT entomologists is striking back. As part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture program involving research scientists in Florida, Louisiana and five other Southern states, Roberto Pereira and Karen Vail are testing a biological intervention at colonies in East and West Tennessee. In late June, Pereira, with the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station, and Vail, with the Agricultural Extension Service, released a protozoan known as Thelohania solenopsae into fire ant colonies near Chattanooga and at the Ames Plantation in southwestern Tennessee.