When it comes to invasives, ants aren’t the only crazies

A super-hardy variety of cockroaches has taken occupancy at the High Line, a New York park fashioned atop an abandoned elevated railway that once marred the Manhattan cityscape.

What’s disconcerting about the insect is that it can better endure winter’s freezing cold, unlike its more delicate cousins.

How these rugged roaches traveled from their Asian habitats to the urban jungle isn’t clear, but the suspicion is that they hitched rides in the fancy plants imported to decorate pocket gardens scattered along the High Line’s boardwalks.

No one is particularly worried since cockroaches, established and new, will likely compete with each other for survival in the garbage-rich zone and aren’t expected to interbreed because of differing genitalia, according to experts who study such insect intimacy.

They do bear monitoring, however, since they have potential to become invasive.

That’s already the case with crazy ants, a non-scientific but fitting name given a bug driving people nuts down South because of its erratic behavior and strange attraction to things electronic.

Crazy ants have been found in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, but have really gotten comfy in Texas, where one man’s initial attempt to remove them from his air conditioner resulted in his vacuuming up five gallons of the little critters — to no avail.

Soon zigzagging bands of ants were running around inside his house, packing a television set with their bodies and leaving sprawling piles of their dead outside.

Just reading about the ants in The magazine gave me the willies and made me glad that we have escaped them, at least for the time being.

We’ve enough problems of our own, what with mammals — feral pigs, goats, sheep and axis deer — and reptiles like Jackson chame-leons and the occasional boa constrictors and pythons, courtesy of the pet trade, and, of course, the cursed screeching coqui frogs.

On the plant front, a decades-long miconia eradication effort vies with pampas grass and tibouchina removal for funds and attention.

A permissive environment enables all sorts of non- native plants, animals and bugs to thrive in Hawaii, muscling in on the islands’ native plants, animals and bugs.

Some of the new organisms aren’t exceedingly harmful, but the ones that are threaten land and ocean ecosystems.

Rules and policies that could prune invasive species often fall short in the face of commerce. If importers were obligated to prove their products would do no harm, as New Zealand requires, Hawaii would not have the almost impossible tasks of ridding the islands of plants like Miconia that suffocate native forests and wildlife, and would not have to spend millions of dollars in the attempts.

Hawaii does not stand alone in combating invasives. A Cornell University study estimates the cost to the nation at $120 billion a year. But with as many as 13 federal agencies involved, authority and expertise are diffused and slow, and in controlling invasive species, better late than never isn’t the best procedure.

How much harm crazy ants can cause isn’t fully evident, though they have been known to smother chicks and swarm over livestock, nor is there an understanding of why electronic devices lure them.

But when they start destroying smartphones, laptops, lamps, cars, airplanes and production machinery, the most invasive of the planet’s species might take action.