Texas already has a crazy uncle and now it has crazy ants. From NBC News, a story by Douglas Main about the paratrechina genus, which swarm into electronics, disabling, even destroying them, perhaps threatening the nation’s Twitter output:

“Exterminator Mike Matthews got the call because the home’s air-conditioning unit had short-circuited. Why an exterminator for a problem with an appliance? Because of the crazy ants.

Matthews has seen crazy ants disable scores of air-conditioning units near Austin, Texas, where the invasive creatures have been a real headache. The ants swarm inside the units, causing them to short-circuit and preventing them from turning on. Often the switches inside them need to be replaced, thanks to the ants, said Matthews, who works for the Austin-area pest control business The Bug Master.

‘When you open these things up, you see thousands of the ants, just completely filling them up,’ Matthews said.

The ants first appeared in the United States in 2002 but have become more of a menace in the past few years, spreading to many areas of the Gulf Coast, particularly Texas and Florida. The ants are obnoxious because they reproduce in large numbers, sometimes outnumbering all other ants 100-to-1. That’s a problem since ecosystems depend on a wide variety of ants to perform different tasks; domination by one species is highly unusual, said Edward LeBrun, a researcher at the University of Texas. As the ants have advanced into new habitats, they’ve had the annoying habit of swarming inside electronics, such as air conditioners and farm equipment like pumps and occasionally destroying them, LeBrun told LiveScience.”