Thursday, May 15th, 2008...3:49 pm - Brett Robertson
NASA’s computers brought down by biological virus!
We’ll i’ll let you read the heading again — nope, it’s not a joke. Apparently millions of tiny, hairy, reddish-brown creatures known as “crazy rasberry ants” – crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and “rasberry” after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on, are causing quite a ruckus down in NASA’s Houston campus.
The ants – formally known as “paratrenicha species near pubens” – have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.
The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.
They arrived and started busily invading homes and offices around town. When NASA’s building services found them, they discovered that these little buggers are attracted to electrical equipment and had messed up sewage pumps, cause fire alarms to go haywire, destroyed computers, and taken out at least one gas meter — and since they’re resistant to over-the-counter ant killers and each colony has multiple queens, they’re nearly impossible to kill.
Worse, those that do die are used by the remaining ants as bridges over pesticide-treated areas. Yep, that’s insanely creepy. The first true biological computer virus… who would of thought!..
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