A colony of ants has taken over his PlayStation console. What now?

Despite being a largely flop game, there are still millions of people out there PlayStation Vitas is out there in the world. Many are gathering dust. Some are waiting to be sold to new buyers who haven’t yet discovered the right beauty for one of Sony’s wildest hardware experiences from the past decade. At least one has been infested by an entire ant colony.

User mutdualeo wrote in Last post on Reddit (Thanks Sports IllustratedIt sounded like Gandalf’s description Drums in the rear during the fall of Morea. “They’re crawling out from every corner (speakers, charging ports, etc.) and it’s terrifying. I’m scared [they’re] You will bite into some of the ingredients in the Vita.”

The owner of the handheld asked fellow PS Vita fans if they had any “experience with expelling ants from electronic devices.” The device had been sitting on a library shelf for two weeks, unattended. At one point, the mutdualeo started noticing a few ants in the room, then a few more, before finally deciding to follow them. But they did not leave the house. They were on their way home to Vita.

Mutdualeo even included video footage of hundreds of tiny black dots zipping through the device’s intricate wiring and circuit boards. “Please help me,” they wrote. “Killing her would be a last resort because they still have eggs in them.” We’ve been here Before with PlayStation 4s and cockroachesbut that was a whole insect community taking over.

The reactions started pouring in. “This is terrifying,” one person wrote. “A real Hellscape,” another wrote. Honest advice soon followed. Read one suggestion: “Maybe try some compressed air, get it outside and blow it.” Another said, “Zip-lock bag and put it in the freezer for a while.” “Remove the battery first!” One commenter quickly clarified.

But the mutdualeo did not want to kill the colony, so more research was needed. One commenter, AholeBrock, said this happened to their girlfriend’s Macbook when she spilled a bunch of juice on it. Maybe the ants naturally get tired of the feta after a few days? But mutdualeo made it clear that there was no spillage, and again pointed to the fact that there were eggs everywhere. AholeBrock writes again that if these are eggs, there must be a queen ant out there somewhere.

Now, you mentioned it, Mutdualeo wrote, I’ve seen one ant bigger than the other. “I think this is the Queen Ant.” They shared a photo. “Looks like it is,” AholeBrock wrote back. “Holy hell. Was that vita still running?”

Luckily, a commenter who was already interested in “social insects and way back” popped up and tried to help identify insects. their opinion of the situation It was as follows:

These pictures aren’t clear enough for me to even try to identify these ants, but they’re enough for me to say you’re actually lucky they’re not crazy, electronics-loving, munching ants. They could have bricked your device! Another thing I can say is that, depending on the shape and size of your queen, these species are completely cloisteral. What that means is that as soon as the queen mates she finds your machine and says yes this is my dream house and she lived in it for a few weeks or a few months. Up to a year! It just needed water, which you most likely got from condensation or from near your device or both. Then she started building her colony from scratch. She started with a few workers from her initial egg and then built from there, with those workers bringing her all your doritos and Domino’s crumbs to feed her growing empire. It’s all from the lonely queen ant crawling into your cracks.

Whether they were actually Rasberry ants, as another commenter suggested, or something else entirely, it didn’t matter in the end. While the mutdualeo hoped he could blow on the ants to get them to leave and carry their eggs with them, things did not go as planned. “I followed some of your suggestions by using a hair dryer, but maybe my voice was too hot, so it accidentally killed the ants.” They wrote in an update a day later.

Things get worse. Mutualeo situation. “The ants look so angry after I swept them away, they gnawed and killed their queen.”

So much for the ant colony. However, the PS Vita seems to be fine now. Mutdualeo finished taking it apart, cleaning it and putting it back together again. “In the end, my PS Vita still works properly and no damage has been done to the hardware,” they wrote. “Thank you for your support and suggestions in cleaning up this mess!”

Perhaps no less handheld device will survive this ordeal. Vita fans are used to beating the odds. Maybe Sony should Make a second one after all.