It seems like crazy ants are in the news all the time these days with all kinds of crazy stories, but there are actually three distinct types of crazy ants (their real name). Paratrechina longicornis, the longhorn crazy ant, is the one that overran Bioshpere 2, a contained ecosystem built in Arizona in the 1980s, killing almost all the other insects in the enclosed environment. They can clone themselves, and if they mate with a son, they can clone him, too, so there’s no inbreeding. Meanwhile, Anoplolepis gracilipes, the yellow crazy ant, is eating all the crabs on Christmas Island and deforming baby sea birds in Hawaii into hideous monsters by spraying them with acid. By far, the craziest of the crazy ants is Nylanderia fulva, the tawny or raspberry crazy ant. These bad boys are destroying the hated fire ant all over the southern United States. Fire ants have an extremely potent poison. A sort of topical insecticide, it’s up to three times more toxic than DDT. Most other ants can’t deal with that, but tawny crazy ants have a secret defense. When they’re hit with fire ant poison, they quickly coat themselves in their own poison. Somehow, this neutralizes the fire ants’ primary weapon with a 98 percent survival rate. Then, just to make it even more weird, the act of using tawny ant poison to counter fire ant poison somehow creates an ionic liquid which has never been seen before in nature.