More fan madness, from Norman, who took this photo after he'd unsuccessfully tried to get the crud off:

Mike Timbers wanted readers to know that water-cooling units need love too...

...and here's another from Rob Brown, halfway through the clean-up operation:

In case you're thinking it'd just be easier to bin the infected component, Erik Pearson offers hope. Here's an Intel Core 2 cooler, with the fan removed, before and after a vigorous scrub:

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
COMMENTS
Holy crap.
I started out thinking "I've seen worse than that", and finished with "holy crap".
What I've learned
It seems that ants are negatively charged - they're all stuck to the positive pin on that capacitor.
Anthill Inside?
And I thought Pratchett made this stuff up!!!

IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth