They will be joined, unofficially, by thousands of red fire ants that plague the tract: just kick up some dirt; they are itching to march, too.
In the insect world there's a parasitic fungus that plagues ant colonies, called Cordyceps.
What to do, for example, about a male character who shrinks as he ages, a dog the size of a horse, objects that levitate and a plague of ants that overrun a country estate but leave when asked?
Some saw the ants as the worst plague since Exodus, others as benign.
The fossil, reported online today in Biology Letters, is the first of a mite from a group whose species commonly plague today's ants, bees, and wasps.
In addition to widespread suffering and devastation, Hurricane Harvey has brought a plague of floating fire ants to the Houston region.
It sounds like the plot of an animal horror B movie: a gigantic plague of flesh-eating "crazy ants" from Argentina invades the city of Birmingham.
The Ouija board, for example, is considered by many to be a magnet for spirits, the equivalent of spreading a trail of crumbs if you are plagued by ants.
As an American Baptist missionary drags his family to the Belgian Congo (later Zaire), his bullying evangelism is paralleled by cold-war jockeying for mineral wealth, amid plagues of ants and floods, lethal green mamba bites and blood diamonds smuggled from breakaway Katanga.
In addition, a large section of the United States is plagued by the red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta), an aggressive swarming and biting species native to South America.
Many researchers have remarked that we may have much to learn from the way ant traffic flows along these trails which seem to be free of the jams that plague our roads.
