Long touted by environmentalists as a way to promote ecological diversity and health amid human development, wildlife corridors may in fact be inviting the destruction of natural spaces they were meant to save.

That's because, aside from allowing the easier movement of indigenous creatures, the long strips of green used to link otherwise separate habitat areas can also be used as a highway over which invasive species can march to their next conquests, says new research out of Florida, where activists are currently pushing for a corridor that stretches from Everglades National Park to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia.

"Although habitat corridors are usually beneficial, they occasionally have negative effects," Julian Resasco, who led a study of red imported fire ants while he was a doctoral student in biology at the University of Florida, said in a news release. "Sometimes they can help invasive species spread in exactly the same way they help native species."

The Sunshine State has been invaded by an array of animal world armies, including Cuban tree frogs, green iguanas, feral hogs, fire ants, crazy ants, giant African snails and Burmese pythons -- the last for which the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sponsored a hunting challenge last year.

In a paper published in the August issue of the journal Ecology, Resasco and his colleagues argue at least one type of fire ant in fact used wildlife corridors to dominate recently created landscapes.

Those findings surprised other scientists, who had believed that, since invasive species typically move over any terrain with relative ease, corridors wouldn't offer any greater benefit to their mobility.

Nonetheless, it was discovered green corridors in South Carolina were well traveled by a particular type of fire ant.

Fire ants, it turns out, have two social groupings: monogyne, which fly high into the air to mate and then rain back down on the ground to create new colonies, and polygyne ants, which mate low to the ground and sometimes crawl short distances to create new colonies, though they generally don't spread widely and their colonies remain dense.

In South Carolina, Resasco and his team examined eight sections of land, each dominated by one of the two social forms of fire ants.

Each section consisted of five patches of regenerating habitat, each one about the size of a football field.

Some patches were connected by a corridor and others were not, which allowed the researchers to study the movement of ants in both instances.

The research found that corridors significantly increased the abundance of polygyne ants, but not the ones.

In polygyne-dominated sections, the diversity of native ant species was lower in patches connected by corridors than in unconnected patches.

The finding, Resasco said, demonstrated a species' natural ability to disperse affected how reliant they were on the corridor to spread.

"It is not a coincidence that the readily-dispersing monogyne [flying] form of fire ants doesn't benefit from corridors, whereas the poorly dispersing polygyne form does," said Resasco, who added more analysis is needed to determine whether the effects of corridors on invasive species are temporary or permanent.

Regardless, in his paper, Resasco -- now an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder -- implores land managers to consider the unique traits of animals when making decisions about land corridors.