ORLANDO, Fla. — Many consider fire ants a pest that comes with living in the Sunshine State, but a researcher at UCF has created a way that can kill off those ants quickly without leaving any harmful chemicals behind.

  • UCF researcher creates tool to kill fire ants without pesticides, chemicals
  • He uses a wand that uses hot water to target nests, filling them up
  • Patent pending for invention; no official name for the device yet

“That one’s active,” said Josh King, an associate professor in the biology department at UCF. Walking around the grass on campus, it doesn’t take long to spot a colony of fire ants.

“If God is a fire ant, I’m in trouble,” King said, laughing. “There’s probably nobody alive that’s killed more fire ants than me.”

King found a way to take care of pesky fire ants around UCF, inventing a wand that uses hot water to target the nests and fill them up, killing the ants.

“There’s a soft spot where they’ve created all the space below ground. And we’re just basically filling it up,” King said.

There are no pesticides or harmful chemicals used, just garden-hose-like pressure going into the ground. His wand is utilize that moderate pressure and extremely hot water able to kill hundreds of colonies a day, each with hundreds of thousands of fire ants inside.

King said he had the idea for this through his work on insect populations, wanting to study the impact it would have on their environment without the invasive species getting in the way.

“That has grown into something that has become a tool for conservation. We use hot water to control fire ants around threatened and endangered wildlife,” King said.

Like protecting sea turtle nests in the sand, King said, for example.

King said the idea of using hot water is nothing new. But he’s glad to see his wand invention bring new life to a time-honored technique when it comes to getting rid of an age-old pest.

“So there you go, that’s a toasted colony,” King said, pointing to what’s left of a major colony after using his invention on it.

Right now, there is a patent pending for King’s invention but no official name for the device yet.