Texas has plenty of native things that can potentially hurt us, like scorpions and coyotes and, well, lawmakers, so the last thing we needed was a hostile carpetbagger from out of state. But in the 1930s, specimens of Solenopsis invicta, or the red imported fire ant, or RIFA, arrived in Mobile, Alabama, on a ship from South America like angry little pirates and headed west. They showed up in Texas in the 1950s and, like every Texas transplant, looked around and thought, “We could run this place.

Scorpion Farming: Discover why scorpion venom is among the world’s costliest liquids and how farmers carefully extract drops worth thousands. | Facts that will blow your mind