Solenopsis geminata

Round these parts, folks just call them "medium sized ants" and then curse. Violently.

  

One of my greatest reliefs in moving from our villa in Dubai to a flat in Sharjah was a respite from the medium sized ants that had taken up strategic defensive positions on the villa's ground floor.

My first, negative experience in Dubai came about a week after my son and I had landed and rejoined the Husband Creature. It was still beastly hot in October, but there was a cool oasis of green grass and shady trees just a short distance from our temporary residence in Bur Dubai. Walkable if one went the long way round to stay in the shadows. 'Pitame, not yet two, was trying to play cricket with the big boys and I watched, sat crosslegged on the luxury of green grass in the desert.

Suddenly, a tiny spot on my lower left shin was sending Times Square sized billboard messages of extreme distress to my bewildered brain. Fire! Plague! Poison! Murder most foul! I'm hit I'm hit! Mayday mayday! I stared at my hysterical leg, which seemed to be trying to escape itself, and was at a loss to comprehend how such a tiny round bump could be broadcasting such excruciating pain.

"I think I might have to go to the hospital," I said to my husband, trying to sound nonchalant. Of course, it seemed a complete nonsensical non-sequitor, coming from the lips of a woman recumbant on the lawn in seeming bliss until a nano second ago. I just couldn't articulate the agony. Searing, yes! Radiating, yes! Hot needles, stilettos, traveling all the nerves from there to up here yes yes yes! Minute, yet heart stopping. Literally. I could feel my heart skipping around in there. "I think I may have been bitten by a spider. Hurts like a sumnabitch," was my maleloquent explaination. I mean, really. Until you've been bitten by something like that, you just don't understand.

After an hour of rubbing, spitting, cursing, and searching the grass for that spider, the constant, internal shriek of pain that made me wish for amputation was replaced by a hefty pulse of breathless agony every five minutes or so. Nothing swelled up, turned green, or fell off, so we decided to scale back the emergency room panic to emergency room standby.

I hardly slept that night. The pulses diminished over the next two days... and just when I thought it was safe to come out of the apartment, WHAM! another nasty bite -- on the nape of my neck -- revealed my arch enemy: an ant. One measly, nasty-looking ant struggling between my two fingers could render me utterly incapacitated, whimper every time that wicked pulse of pain shot out from my poor neck. Or wherever the hell else those foulmouthed louts decided to strike.

Imagine my dismay when we found our band new villa already inhabited by these tiny bullies! Nothing could dissuade them, nothing could evict them. Not ant spray with a mile-long tube to reach deep inside nests. Not dried potato flakes, guaranteed to expand in their abdomens and blow them up. Nothing would kill these suckers. Nothing. Nothing except shoes.

I found my son in the living room one morning, my sandal in his little hand, enthusiastically whacking random floor tiles. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" he exulted, every time the footwear slapped the floor.

"What are you doing, buddy?" I asked as casually as I could, vaguely horrified at the sight of my bloodthirsty toddler.

"I killin ANTS, mama!" He was so proud. "Kill! Kill! Kill!" screamed my son. WHAP WHAP WHAP went the shoe. I tried to instill a Buddhist-like respect for all living beings in my murderous son; he just looked at me like I was nuts. Ants = pain. Ants must die. Simple. I wondered who would end up on the shrink's couch for this one: him, or me?

The ants and I reached an uneasy truce: I killed them every way I knew how, and they bit us every chance they got. I mean, fair's fair, right? OK, so maybe it wasn't a truce, maybe it was all out war, but if they would just stopped biting me and my son, maybe I'd stop killing them, right? I tried to hide my attempted local genocide from my son, preaching tolerance and love and No Killing whenever I found him dancing around the living room, playing Medium Sized Ant Twister. Left foot, ANT! Right foot, ANT! Right hand, ANT! The months went by, highlighted by a turf war between the medium sized killers and some enterprising little Pharoah ants who had been colonizing the light switches, but had set their sights on some ground level real estate. It was a bloobath. Itty bitty ant corpses strewn across my elegant Italian tile floor, ravished by as many as five or six medium sized monsters at a time.

Mind you, these ants were fierce. And determined. They had drilled their home through ceramic tile and grout. No wimpy wood flooring, here. The ceramic floors were a godsend, though, come potty training time. I simply dressed the kid in a long tee shirt and let his zizi (exact translation: french for... oh hang it, i don't know the English baby word for 'penis' any more... ) hang out in the secluded breeze, probably singing Born Free in its little, zizi mind. You see where this is headed, don't you? Accidents were a breeze to clean off the tile floors. We were making fantastic progress in this perilous milestone.

Until one day, my son, who had been happily playing in the living room with his toy cars, let out a scream that had me convinced he'd shoved a screwdriver in the electrical outlet. Here, in Dubai, with 220 DC. Instead, I found him standing, bright red, howling, one hand clutching his preciouses, the other hand in his mouth, wailing, "ANT BITE ME ON MY ZIZI!" over and over and over. Let me tell you, this isn't a bobo that maman can kiss better. Oh me oh my no. Please no.

He screamed for 20 minutes. This is the kid who laughs when he falls off the bed and whacks himself senseless. I hugged and whispered and rocked and put cortisone and bobo cream on his bobo, a bright red dot on his poor little scrotum, I ran a cool bath and put a sachet of oatmeal and lavender in it, I snuggled him for hours as the waves of incomprehensible pain washed through his body from his most joyous parts. It was days before he'd squat down to play on any floor, and he mashed medium sized ants with a fury that only an outraged toddler could. I didn't stop him. I joined him. How dare they bite my son there!!

Today at the park, over a year since 'the incident', my son was playing in the sand. "Is that a medium size ant, mama?" he asked me in an innocent little boy voice.
"Yes, sweets, it is."
"Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!" grunted my son, and WHAM WHAM WHAM went his little bucket into the sand. Who can blame him?

Solenopsis geminata spread outside its native range at least several centuries ago, e.g., to the Antilles in the sixteenth century (Wilson 2005) and it was well established in Hawaii by the 1870s (Reimer et al. 1990). Some of the variation seen within the species in Florida may be due to introductions of populations from elsewhere within its native range (Deyrup et al. 2000). It is still spreading, being a relatively new arrival in Arabia (first records from Dubai al. 1997)), and new populations have been detected in towns in northern Australia (Andersen et al. 2004; Hoffmann & O’Connor 2004)