“I think we’ve missed all the real opportunities,” Rasberry told me one afternoon. “There’s no way out.” We were having lunch at Central Texas Style BBQ, around the corner from his office in Pearland. On the television behind me, Fox News was reporting that shots had been fired at the Capitol in Washington. The full story, which we did not yet know, was that a 34-year-old dental hygienist from Connecticut had buckled her 1-year-old daughter into a car seat and tried to ram her black Infiniti into a checkpoint at the White House. There was a car chase, and snipers snapping into position everywhere, and people in business attire scuffling to safety every which way — scattering like ants, you might say, except that some of them could be seen grasping jumbles of paperwork or texting as they ran. No one in the restaurant paid much attention to the television. It was on mute. Sade was playing.

All the other news was about the government shutdown, then in its third day. When I arrived at Mike the Hog-a-Nator’s place the previous morning, he was perched on the edge of his easy chair, watching CNN on a huge new flat-screen television — a clearly imperiled replacement for the television the ants had already destroyed — desperate to learn how his disability payments might be affected. “I’m fighting these hogs, I’m fighting these ants, I’m fighting for my life,” Mike the Hog-a-Nator told me. He sounded overwhelmed.

Rasberry was being affected, too. He explained that for years he had a contract with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Gradually they managed to tamp down a crazy-ant infestation there, but the shutdown was keeping his technician out of the facility. Rasberry worried that, if they wound up locked out of NASA for three or four weeks, the agency was “going to have a mess out there.” He said it without any hint of foreboding, or even much interest.

Rasberry had worked through most of his ribs by now and was sinking a spoon into his banana pudding. “I’ll fix what I can fix,” he said. He is convinced that the next, obvious wave of damage from the crazy ants will be ecological: they will decimate ground-dwelling bird species, just as fire ants devastated Texas’ quail, and they’ll usurp nearly every other insect species until it’s all Rasberry crazy ants, everywhere. “You knock nature off balance, and ain’t nobody there to catch her,” he said. Entomologists speculate that crazy ants may eventually run into predators along the Gulf Coast. If that happens, their populations will crunch down to less spectacular — maybe even manageable — sizes. But, these scientists add, the damage done before that happens could be enormous. On the other hand, maybe this is as dystopian as the ant situation gets, and next summer will be better. We understand so little about these crazy ants; it’s hard to say what’s possible, or where they’ll go next.

Not long ago, Rasberry told me, he got a call on his cellphone from a woman who said, “I know how to fix the ant issue.” He could have been furious — it was 11:38 p.m. — but he invited her to go on. She said her plan was to import anteaters. Rasberry paused, then started troubleshooting, working all the angles, reeling her in. Would we lead them around on leashes? “And how many do you think we’ll need to import?” he asked her. “A million? Two million?” The woman thought it over. “If that’s what it takes,” she said.