Fire ant queens. Even if only one queen survives, within a month or so, the colony can expand to thousands of individuals. Some colonies may be polygynous (having multiple queens per nest). Fire ants are resilient and can survive floods. During Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017, clumps of fire ants, known as rafts, were seen clumped together on the surface of the water. Each clump had as many as 100,000 individual ants, which formed a temporary structure until finding a new permanent home. Fire ant queens, the reproductive females in their colony, also are generally the largest. Their primary function is
Red imported fire ant mellifera"). The specific epithet of the red imported fire ant, "invicta", derives from Latin, and means "invincible" or "unconquered". The epithet originates from the phrase "Roma invicta" ("unconquered Rome"), used as an inspirational quote until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. This symbolic statement was printed on minted coins. The generic name, "Solenopsis", translates as "appearance" or "face" from Ancient Greek. It is a compound of two Ancient Greek words–"solen", meaning "pipe" or "channel", and "opsis", meaning "appearance" or "sight". The ant is commonly known as the "red imported fire ant" (abbreviated as RIFA), because of