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FIRE ANTS: PAINFUL AS THE NAME SUGGESTS

Their name screams it all: FIRE ANTS. If you don't know anything about them, millions of people in the southern U.S. do, having learned the hard way. Being mass-stung by an angry horde of fire ants is an unforgettably painful experience.

To Eldridge Adams, Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the multi-stings of fire ants are as familiar as handshakes. He's been stung hundreds of times, since fire ants are major subjects in his field studies.

Native to South America, fire ants were ferried unwittingly to the U.S. on a cargo ship from Brazil. A breeding colony jumped ship in Mobile, Alabama, around 1920. Once established, the ants adapted exceptionally well to the southern U.S., spreading like the plague they are into a belt now reaching from Virginia to southern California. These imported fire ants are a single species, Solenopsis invicta, though there are several other species of fire ant in nature. S. invicta is now the most seriously pestiferous ant species in the U.S.

Dr. Adams's two major areas of study are the population ecology and behavior of social insects. Originally from Los Angeles, as an undergraduate at Harvard from 1975-1979, he studied ants with entomologist Bert Holldobler.

Why study fire ants? "Fire ants are excellent subjects for studies on social cooperation and competition and the effects of behavior on population dynamics" he says. They're also convenient, because, Adams explains, fire ant colonies grow quickly and their mosaics of abutting territories allow abundant opportunities for studying interractions among colonies. Since they're a pest species, fire ants have been studied more than any other ant species, so a much is already known about them.

Adams keeps about a hundred thriving colonies of fire ants on hand at Torrey Life Sciences at Uconn, safely out of the way in a double-doored room.

Aggressive, omnivorous, and producing high population densities, fire ants feed on insects and related creatures, dead vertebrate animals, and seeds. They build their underground castles in fields, roadsides, and lawns. Newly founded colonies may have only one queen or several queens with their broods all working together.

Currently, with a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, Adams is researching how adjacent fire ant colonies struggle for

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