Ann Sorenson
“TDA, under Reagan Brown, was very pro-pesticide. The staff were wearing chemical company baseball caps and buckles. TDA wasn’t distinguishing between imported and native fire ants.
In the 1980’s, fire ants took over the University of Texas’ Brackenridge Field Station. Dr. Larry Gilbert’s at UT and his students started mapping the spread of imported fire ants. The native flies had a parasite, phorid flies, that kept their population in check. The imported ants didn’t. I suggested that TDA fund a couple of post-docs to study this issue: Sanford Porter and Ed Nargo, two of the top post docs in this field in the country. Texas A&M was very protective of their fire ant research funds. Their lobbyist, Brad Benson, went to the legislature and shut off the discretionary funds for TDA to hire the post docs. But as part of the deal, A&M had to share fire ant funding with other universities, including the University of Texas, which got $400,000. So UT was able to hire the researchers.”
Without Ann Sorensen, I doubt our Invasive Species Research program would exist now and without Hightower, Ann wouldn’t have had a job at TDA,” notes Dr. Gilbert. Today, that early research on phorid flies has become a muli-million dollar 11-state program under the US Department of Agriculture to mass-raise and release phorid flies to target imported fire ants. “Most of the native fire ants are gone in Texas. The goal of the biologic research is to bring down to 50 percent of what the count would be without predators. The aim is to reduce the density to about what the population of native fire ants was previous to the arrival of imported fire ants,” explains Dr. Gilbert.
Ann Sorenson was a post-doctoral student who jumped at the chance to return to Texas to research fire ants at TDA. In 1982, Reagan Brown, then Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, raised the specter of “marauding armies of fire ants goose-stepping through River Oaks.” (Texas Monthly 2/82). His solution: aerial spraying of all the area west of Austin to halt the spread of imported fire ants. The pesticide manufacturer had offered to give him enough pesticide to spray every acre west of Austin. “The thought was that it would create a barrier so fire ants wouldn’t spread. In fact, it would create a beachhead, because you’re wiping out all the competitors”, noted Dr. Larry Gilbert, Director of UT Austin’s Brackenridge Field Lab. Jim Hightower, who defeated Reagan Brown, hired Ann to implement a more targeted pesticide application and more research into natural predators of the imported fire ants.
