I feel compelled to repost the NYT's excellent, terrifying article on "Crazy Ants", particularly the section about how the constant stream of dead ant bodies also creates functional structures:
> Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.
Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It’s common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.
Ants in Texas are terrible. Off the top of my head --
1. I was stung by a swarm of fire ants when I was ten years old. I had been standing, and hadn't realized that I was standing right on an ant bed. I remember an adult carrying me away, and blinding pain.
2. Ants infested the office of my last job in Texas. Every desk was equipped with an ant motel. One of the water fountains near my desk was completely unusable because of the infestation. All attempts to eradicate the ants failed.
3. At my last apartment in Texas, the ant infestation was so bad that significant numbers of them would crawl up the tires and get in my car. I'd be driving along and realize that there were ants crawling on my hands. I was actually worried that I would take the infestation with me when I moved to the bay area -- but thankfully I haven't seen one since I moved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy-ants.html
> Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.
Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It’s common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.