Honolulu Lite
You'd think that if you lived on an island overrun with millions upon millions of land crabs the size of footballs -- with claws that can rip open a coconut and which once a year migrate en masse to the sea, climbing over hill, dale, house, car, baby and dog -- that maybe those crabs are a problem. Hawaii Crazy Ants aren’t crazy
You'd think that unless you live on Christmas Island off Australia, in which case you'd think that millions crabs crawling all over creation is an amusing thing and that the heavily armed crustaceans bring a certain charm to an otherwise desolate coral speck in the ocean. I suppose when you live on an island named after a happy holiday like Christmas, you're apt to be a little more cheerful and tolerant of marauding entrees.
What the Christmas Islanders will not tolerate are ants and right now they are trying mightily not to tolerate millions and millions of "Crazy Ants" which have suddenly put the millions and millions of land crabs on their menu.
Crazy Ants are long-legged beasts that squirt acid to debilitate their prey and then swarm over them. Christmas Island, whose environment has been a delicate ecological balance of crabs, trees and people, has suddenly been thrown out of whack by Crazy Ants. The balance has shifted to become ants, crabs, ants, trees, ants, people, ants, ants and ants.
Nobody's sure why the Crazy Ants suddenly turned on the crabs, but scientists think it's either because they ran out of other species to fight (i.e. other ants) or that they're sick and tired of being called crazy. There is no end in sight to the mayhem the Crazy Ants are causing the crab population, which, though interesting in an Alfred Hitckcockian way, doesn't have anything to do with us in Hawaii.
Or does it? It turns out that we have Crazy Ants here, along with 49 other species of ant. Thankfully, our Crazy Ants are so busy fighting with other ants for food and territory that they have been unable to turn their wrath on crabs, egrets, mynah birds, poodles or other moderate-sized creatures.
Crazy Ants are called that because they haven't mastered the most basic of ant skills, which is to say, walking in a line. But what they lack in line formation know-how, they make up in their ability to race around in complete chaos, terrorizing any life forms smaller than them. (And let's not forget the acid-squirting thing.)
Along with Crazy Ants, Hawaii has Carpenter Ants, Big-headed Ants, Little Yellow Ants and Fire Ants. You never see ants called Friendly Ants, Comely Ants or Jolly Ants, which, to my non-scientific mind, may have something to do with why ants are so angry all the time.
So we have Crazy Ants, but they aren't really crazy, just kind of agitated. Hawaii, in fact, has four of the eight most destructive alien species on the planet: Crazy Ants, mongoose, strawberry guava and water hyacinth. We don't have the Brown Tree Snake, Nile Perch, Zebra Mussel or Bushtail Possum, though not for lack of trying. A couple of dead Brown Tree snakes have been found at the airport on flights from Guam. If they do eventually get a foothold here, we can only hope that Crazy Ants find them tasty.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com