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 species. Although parasitism pressures by these flies do not affect the ants' population density and activity, it has a small effect on a colony population. The strepsipteran insect "Caenocholax fenyesi" is known to infect male ants of this species and attack the eggs, and the mite "Pyemotes tritici" has been considered a potential biological agent against red imported fire ants, capable of parasitising every caste within the colony. Bacteria, such as "Wolbachia", has been found in the red imported fire ant; three different variants of the bacteria are known to infect the red imported fire ant. However, its effect on