Ants, small as they may be can wreck havoc to your electronic equipment. Who’ll ever think of ants eating up your computer, air conditioner, freezer or other electronic devices. Sounds unrealistic but this is true for the Crazy Raspberry ant which can be found in Texas.

The ant is commonly called the Crazy Raspberry ant or Raspberry Crazy ant, whichever you’d prefer to call it, named after the exterminator Tom Raspberry who first dealt with this type of ant way back 2002. The species is named Paratrechina species near pubens by scientist for now, believing that they are closely related with the Caribbean crazy ant. These ants are about one-eight of an inch long and are covered with reddish-brown hair. They have multiple queens in a colony which makes it hard to terminate them. Having multiple queens, they also reproduce faster.

These ants are so notorious in wrecking electronic devices, you can practically find them in “bundles” inside your computers CPU. Even the Johnson Space Center had seeked the help of Raspberry in an attempt to keep the ants out of their facilities. But it’s too late. Rasberry found three colonies at the NASA site, but all have been small enough to control.

What attracts them to electronic equipment is still a mystery. There a couple of theories though. One is, it might be the magnetic field that surrounds the wires with electronic current flowing through them. Second, it might be the heat produced by the wires as a byproduct of resistance. Whatever it is, these ants short circuits electronic equipments after they chew through the insulation and also they can cause overheating and mechanical failures due to their sheer number present in a device or equipment.