The unusually cold weather in Florida this year has nearly arrested growth on the state's strawberry plants, which has cut fruit production by more than half, said Ted Campbell, executive director of the Florida Strawberry Growers Association in Dover, the industry trade group.

"It's absolutely a financial disaster for strawberry growers," Campbell said Thursday. "The fields are full of just green fruit and bloom."

"Some of the crop that we had booked in from Florida was cancelled out. We had to go through the Mexican crop. Florida has less than half the crop that they were setting on a year ago. The cost has more than doubled for the same product, " says store manager, Rich Daugherty.

Daugherty says California's strawberry crop isn't any better because of the eight inches of rain the area has received. So, customers are going to have to pay more than they're used to seeing this time of year if they want to put strawberries in their grocery carts.

With up to 50 new rides, shows and attractions, it will be the biggest of five Legolands worldwide. The park is packaged to entice parents and kids 2 to 12 years old to spend a day immersed in a world that revolves around plastic Lego bricks, one of the world's most popular toys.

The plans include reopening the historic botanical garden that founders Dick and Julie Pope carved out of a cypress swamp in 1936 and fashioned into what was claimed to be Florida's first theme park. The once-famous water ski shows could return in the form of a Lego-themed stunt show, and the park will get its own studio with a full-time staff of Lego model artists. Cypress Gardens' leftover midway thrill rides and one or both of its wooden roller coasters will be sold.

Freeze warnings were posted by the National Weather Service as far south as the Orlando area, which may be as many as 20 degrees below normal tonight, the National Weather Service said. The advisory alerts growers that subfreezing temperatures are imminent and may kill crops or other sensitive vegetation.

Tampa and others cities in the central part of the state are under a freeze warning from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. local time tomorrow. Temperatures may fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero Celsius) for more than three consecutive hours, the National Weather Service in Tampa said on its Web site.

"This is a pretty significant cold snap," Matt Keefe, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. "This could really put a hurting on the citrus crop." He said the jet stream, which normally keeps the coldest air north of the Hudson Bay in Canada, is centered over parts of Alabama and Mississippi. "The cold temperatures could last for a good part of the week," he said.

Orange juice may rise to $1.25 a pound, Geld said today in an interview in Sao Paulo. Futures for January delivery rose 1.6 percent to $1.1725 on ICE Futures U.S. in New York today. "The citrus greening situation in Florida is very serious and is likely to fuel prices in the next six to 18 months," Geld said. Rising global demand will also contribute to price increases, he said.

The orange harvest in Florida runs from Oct. 1 through January. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Oct. 9 that Florida's crop will be 136 million boxes, down from 162.4 million boxes collected a year earlier.

"Crazy ants" swarm exterminator Tom Rasberry's hands in a Pearland, Texas, field with a heavy infestation. Called crazy ants because they scramble in all directions rather than trudging along a straight track, the ants carpet the ground and swarm over anything in their way -- plants, animals or humans. Scientists think the ants originated in the Caribbean.

The bugs, technically known as paratrechina species near pubens, form multiqueen supercolonies and breed by the millions, especially during the summer. They have now spread to 14 Texas counties, mostly around Houston, but have been found in three new spots this summer, including San Antonio 200 miles to the west. In Florida, similar insects are known as Caribbean crazy ants (paratrechina pubens), and they have been spreading rapidly for about five years, said Roberto M. Pereira, associate research scientist at the University of Florida.

In Texas, the bugs are known as Rasberry crazy ants, after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator in this Houston suburb who has been warning about the new ants since he first found them in 2002. They "pose a clear and present danger to our way of life," he warns on a blog he devotes to the bugs (http://crazyrasberryants.blogspot.com/).

Across south Texas, the insects have been shorting out electrical sockets, air conditioners and, at Cindy Fitch's house in Pearland, the transformer that controls her floodlights. She has replaced it three times in the past two years.

The big worry, says the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, is that people with illegal exotic pets will simply open the door and let them go, or slip them into a local pond or river.

Many pets, the commission says, can't survive in the wild, but equally important it is "not ecologically responsible" to toss a species into the ecosystem that could harm native wildlife. Many of the 133 non-native species now found in the wild in Florida came from released pets, it says.

Owners can bring their exotic reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish and mammals -- but no domestic cats and dogs -- to the MetroZoo in Miami on March 21, Florida's fifth Nonnative Pet Amnesty Day.

The Sheraton on Grand Bahama Island, which had stopped taking student groups for the last couple of years, is now working with StudentCity.com, an online student travel agency, and accepting student groups for four-night stays in March for the agency's Bahamas Party Cruise package priced at $589, including taxes and fees.

The Pro Family Spring Break Coalition of Panama City Beach, Fla., which in 2007 put out a press release about its efforts to "fight back against college spring break," has disbanded, though the businesses that made up the group still actively market to families. For the second year in a row the city has teamed up with mtvU, MTV's college network, with two weeks of live performances and undulating student crowds from March 8 to 21.

"We've realized that we need to encourage college students to come but make sure we're not excluding families," said Dan Rowe, president of the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Even Daytona Beach, Fla., which continues to market to families rather than students, acknowledged that their business would be welcome. "We're going to try and hold out," said Tangela Boyd, a spokeswoman for the Daytona Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. "Of course," she quickly added, "if students came we’re not going to turn them away."

The issue for state regulators is not animal cruelty but sanitation, Antonacci said.

Florida has existing regulation forbidding pets or animals -- aside from trained assistance dogs -- in salons. There was also concern about clients swishing digits in water possibly containing leftover bits of previous clients.

"Disinfection between customers, there is no way that can be done," Antonacci said.

In Maryland, according to an Associated Press report last year, there were no state regulations for the pedicures, either, but one county health department ordered a salon to switch from a communal pool to small tanks and water changes for each customer.