Super-soldier ants that grow to double or triple normal size, with huge oblong heads and giant vicious mandibles are swarming into the greater Phoenix region.

This happened shortly after a McGill University researcher induced the growth of supersoldiers in his lab and shown this Incredible Hulk-like potential exists in all species.  Some “evil” forces got hold of the professors research and unleashed these ants – which reproduced at lightening speed – into the Southwest.   The Department of Homeland Security is  meeting today to address the situation.

The ants have been swarming communities, fires have broken out and there have been a numerous injuries and reports of fatalities.

Jakob Meirheim, Professor in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at McGill University, may have unleashed genetic monsters.

Meirheim showed that dormant genes can be locked in place for millions of years, only to re-emerge as a result of environmental conditions.

“Birds with teeth, snakes with fingers, and humans with apelike hair – these are ancestral traits that pop up regularly in nature,” Meirheim explained. “But for the longest time in evolutionary theory, these ancestral traits were thought to go nowhere – slips in the developmental system that reveal things from the past.”

These “slips” are actually dormant traits that are common to every member of a given species.

“Any time you have a mismatch between the normal environment of the organism and its genetic potential you can release (new characteristics) – and these things can be locked in place for 30 to 65 million years.”

Homeland Security officials captured a few Super Ants to study (and destroy):

There are some 1,100 species of Pheidole ants, which have two castes: worker ants and soldiers. But only eight of the 1,100 species were known to produce a third caste of super-soldier in reaction to stress – mostly in regions of the Southwest United States and Mexico.

Meirheim applied the growth hormone methoprene to the larvae of various Pheidole ants previously unknown to beget super-soldiers during a “narrow window” in their gestation, the ants developed huge heads and useless wings.

Scientists are confident that they can overcome and counteract the Super Soldier Ants… but they would not say if they had a solution yet.  Homeland Security promises to solve the problem in the next two weeks.  But by then, the Super Ants will have multiplied exponentially…