Texas has plenty of native things that can potentially hurt us, like scorpions and coyotes and, well, lawmakers, so the last thing we needed was a hostile carpetbagger from out of state. But in the 1930s, specimens of Solenopsis invicta , or the red imported fire ant, or RIFA, arrived in Mobile, Alabama, on a ship from South America like angry little pirates and headed west. They showed up in Texas in the 1950s and, like every Texas transplant, looked around and thought, “We could run this place.” Unfortunately, they now kind of do.

Pretty much every Texan has fallen victim to these little buggers— an estimated 80 percent , to be exact. “When I was eleven, I did the splits right into a fire ant hill during cheerleading practice in Garland,” said my friend Pamela Milam in a Facebook me

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