arid landscape. When they meet, it is an immediate mixture of carnage and chemical warfare. Both sides swarm the front lines, spewing corrosive venom and dying by the thousands. But while the melee may look uneven at first glance—one species has reigned this foreign soil uncontested for decades, while the other is a smaller and weaker newcomer—the odd newcomer is the clear victor when the dust settles.

This battle is happening underfoot on the U.S. gulf coast right now. And for the first time since the insidious South American fire ant invaded North America in the 1960's, it is being beaten back by a new invader: the tawny crazy ant. In a paper published today in the journal Science, Edward LeBrun, an entomologist at the University of Texas at Austin, explains how the tawny crazy ants are winning.

"Other ant species typically avoid fire ants," says LeBrun, "fire ant venom is so toxic that it's not something other ants will confront. But these crazy ants will just charge on into the fray with what seems like wild, willful abandon."

The key to their success, LeBrun says, is the crazy ants' chemical defenses. Once a crazy ant suffers what should be a fatal dose of fire ant venom, the ant quickly retreats from the battle to apply its own caustic venom onto its body. For reasons the researchers still don't quite understand, the crazy ant venom acts like a healing salve, neutralizing the effect of the fire ant's toxic ammunition. "And when they're done, they'll run right back in to fight and take on another fire ant," LeBrun says. This tactic is so effective that in the places where both kinds ants live, "the tawny crazy ants are just steamrolling the fire ant populations," he says.

Even more interesting: By pitting the crazy ants against several other ant species, LeBrun and his colleagues found that while the crazy ants will employ the same detoxifying technique against various other ant species, they're not sure whether it's effective against any other ant species. It's as if they have evolved to engage and destroy these fire ants. And according to David Holway, an entomologist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study, that very well may be the case.

"One of the really fascinating things is that these two species share a long, common evolutionary history," Holway says. "They're both from some of the same parts of South America. So this detoxification ability in the crazy ants is something that might have emerged from interactions with the fire ants over many millennia." In other words: While the U.S. is a new battleground for these two species, theirs is an age-old conflict.

While the populations of invasive tawny crazy ants have been spreading in the U.S. since 2002, only in the last few years have scientists noticed a dramatic growth. However, it's unlikely that the new invader will displace fire ants nationwide. They seem to be sticking to the Gulf Coast. "The tawny crazy ants' native range is fairly tropical, so it's unlikely to spread that far north," Holway says.

Even still, there may be more at stake than just the countless lives of fire ants, says Eleanor Spicer Rice, an entomologist and science editor at Verdant Word who was not involved in the study. "Each ant species we have plays a valuable role in the environment. Some turn the soil, others plant seeds or regulate the pest population in trees. So when a new species of ant takes over an area, it can completely change the way that habitat works," she says. The agricultural and environmental impacts (as well as the countless extermination attempts) that resulted from the fire ant invasion are estimated to have cost the U.S. billions of dollars nationwide. Experts aren't sure what changes the crazy ants could bring to the ecosystems they invade.

And we humans have reason to worry too, Spicer Rice says. "Their venom stings so much that people think that fire ants are jerks. But somebody living in a house in these areas, you have to wonder which [ant] you're going to hate more. Fire ants sting, but will stay in your back yard. These crazy ants will move into your house and into your electrical equipment. People normally only notice ants when they start to bother them, but this is a great reason to start paying attention now."

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io