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A crazy ant queen. Photo: Joe MacGown, Mississippi Entomological Museum

Since fire ants first invaded the U.S. through cargo ships docking in Mobile, Alabama, the aggressive pest has taken a firm hold in the South and Southwest. More than $5 billion is spent each year on medical treatment and fire ant control, according to Food and Drug Administration, and the ants cost an additional $750 million in agricultural damage.

Now, however, there’s a new ant on the block. The crazy ant – also an invader from South America – is displacing fire ants in the U.S. by gobbling them up. But this unprescribed cure is likely worse than the disease it’s treating. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Like fire ants, these South American invaders seem to be fond of electrical equipment. But unlike their stinging red counterparts, the tawny crazy ants create mega-colonies, sometimes in homes, and push out local populations of ants and arthropods.

Thus  far, the crazy ants are not falling for the traditional poisons used to eliminate fire ant mounds. And when local mounds are destroyed manually, they are quickly regenerated.

Though the crazy ants don’t deliver the same burning bite as fire ants, they do stubbornly make their nests in bathroom plumbing or in walls. So far, researchers haven’t documented any native animals preying on the crazy ants, so their colonies are allowed to run amok, sometimes growing 100 times the size of other species of ants living in the area.

This isn’t the first time one ant invader has been displaced by another. The Argentine ant arrived back in 1891, followed by the black ant in 1918. But the fire ant put an end to those two invasive species when it arrived a couple decades later. Now, the fire ant’s own day of invasive reckoning may have arrived, but rather than feel relieved, researches are worried. Southern ecosystems have had time to adjust to fire ants. Crazy ants—well, who knows what they’ll do?

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Photo: Ron Lute

Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

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Right now, astronauts on the International Space Station live on periodic supply drops, but if we’re ever going to really live in space, with colonies on other planets or aboard interstellar transports, we’ve got to figure out the food situation. Plants have spent their entire history growing under Earth’s gravity, and biologists know that living in zero-G stresses them out. But to really figure out exactly how plants get stressed meant killing the plant and cutting it open—an herbal autopsy.

On the ISS, says NASA, researchers are growing a strain of genetically engineered plant that glows when and where it gets stressed. With this tool, researchers can track how these plants are affected by living in space without having to cut them down.  The researchers are using a heavily researched flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, more commonly known as thale cress. According to NASA, the research is important for learning how plants can grow in preparation for “future long-duration exploration.”

Arabidopsis thaliana. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But more than just being about growing plants in space, the scientists want to use the cress to understand the fundamentals of how stressed-out plants might adapt to climate change. So, they’re deliberately trying to stress the cress out, “exposing the plant to extremes of pressure, temperature, and drought.”

This isn’t the first thing we’ve genetically modified to glow-in-the-dark, either. In Japan, says David Biello, researchers used jellyfish genes to make glow-in-the-dark cats. We’ve also got glowing tobacco, that lets you know when it needs to be watered. And a still-ongoing Kickstarter campaign wants your help to grow glowing-plant technology, and they’ll give you a glowing arabidopsis to do so.

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The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is in trouble because of colony collapse disorder. Photo: Philippe Henry

Across the planet honeybees have been in decline. A mysterious disorder leaves hives, full in the fall, empty come spring. The bees are gone, but the bodies missing. It’s a problem with a name—Colony Collapse Disorder—but without a known cause. Advocates, politicians, reporters and even some scientists have pet theories about the cause—pesticides, intensive agriculture, mites—but the reality is we just don’t know the true cause just yet. In all likelihood, it’s a combination of factors.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois add one more. They found that high fructose corn syrup and other honey substitutes—sugary substances fed to bees in place of the honey we take from them—may be related to the recent dramatic decline in bee populations. According to the Los Angeles Times, eating honey made from pollen gives bees a chemical that they need to help break down the toxins in pesticides.

Although pollen winds up in the honey produced by Apis mellifera, these bees used to pollinate crops spend more time sipping on the same sugar substitute that is ubiquitous in processed foods – high-fructose corn syrup. The honey substitute is an important way for the industry, which contributes about $14 billion to the U.S. economy, to make ends meet.

The finding paints a picture of the complex interaction of forces that may be keeping the bee down: a bad diet makes them more susceptible to pesticides. Pesticides may, in turn, make them more susceptible to varroa mites, another contender for the cause behind CCD.

“People would love to have the one solution, but the problems is it really does seem like it’s a combination of factors,” Berenbaum said. But a compromised immune system, she added, could complicate all of the identified factors.

The researchers found that p-coumaric acid, a compound derived from plants, is “a key compound that revs up the bee’s defense system.” High fructose corn syrup and other replacements don’t have this, making the bees more susceptible.

Research in the 1970s had suggested that there were no health consequences or increased hazards associated with feeding bees on high-fructose corn syrup. But that was before beekeepers began putting mite-killing chemicals in hives, and before an entire class of agricultural pesticide was introduced.

Something is certainly going wrong with our bees, but as research builds it’s a reminder that it is going to take a wide-angled approach to figure out what’s going on and fix it.

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Photo: Stevemaher

From a report put out by the Food and Drug Administration in February, a scary note from the front lines of the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Looking at meat in the supermarket, the FDA found that around half of all ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef harbored antibiotic resistant bacteria says the New York Times. Almost all of the meat had Enterococcus bacteria, a family of microbes that has a high rate of antibiotic resistance and can cause urinary tract infections and other health problems. Chicken samples had antibiotic resistant salmonella and antibiotic resistant campylobacter, which cause food poisoning replete with diarrhea and fever.

High rates of bacteria on your meat isn’t really the issue, though. Everyone knows (or should know) to make sure their meat is cooked throughout, and to keep raw meat away from things that won’t be cooked.

The bigger problem, says the Times, is the rise seen in antibiotic resistant bacteria compared to previous years.

Of all the salmonella found on raw chicken pieces sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, while less than 50 percent of the salmonella found on chicken tested in 2002 was of a superbug variety.

According to a big investigative story put together by health reporter Maryn McKenna and colleagues, the rise of antibiotic resistant e. coli carried by chickens could be behind the prevalence of urinary tract infections in American women, with one in nine women being affected each year.

The federal government’s report, says the Times, was largely ignored until a follow-up report was put out by the environmental lobby organization Environmental Working Group, and Applegate, a company that sells “organic and natural meats.”

“Public health officials in the United States and in Europe,” says the Times, warn that the over-use is antibiotics in agriculture is helping to drive the rise in resistance.

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