Ant Issues

Our rain forest is doomed!  Why?  We've run out of bug spray.  Or to be more specific we've run out of funding to buy bug spray.  Apparently we need six million dollars worth or our incredibly important and significant (other people's opinion, not necessarily mine) rain forest is, as mentioned earlier, doomed!

According to The Guardian my favoured source of "Mankind is destroying the planet" stories (also my favoured source for "Trump is the Antichrist" stories) the yellow crazy ant is going to destroy our rainforests.  The yellow crazy ant is an invasive species and can be differentiated from the bog standard crazy ant because its yellow.  It's also one hell of an invader although there seems to be a fair amount of confusion as to where its actually invading from.  Yellow crazy ants turn up and invade the crap out of a place but there is no definitely documented native habitat that they might have originated in.  The closest we can come is to assume that the species evolved in packing crates onboard freighters and simply started invading the moment they hit dry land.

And wow are they impressive invaders!  Over in Christmas Island they are apparently redesigning the entire ecosystem to suit themselves (why can't we do that) and cheerfully wiping out any number of endangered crab species.  Or, at least, the crab species are endangered now that the ants have turned up.  In Queensland apparently an entire rainforest is under threat.  At this point I'm finding it difficult to understand why we don't just side with the winners and redesignate the rainforest as a yellow crazy ant habitat.  Possibly we're worried that if we don't stop them now we may find entire cities converted into ant colonies.  Is it too late to offer them Canberra?

To stop, or at least slow down, the relentless approach of the formic marauders an elite team from the Wet Tropics Management Authority including contractors (probably not a euphemism for mercenaries in this instance) and Aboriginal rangers has been deployed on ant extermination duties.  This is not without its risks as several members of the team have staggered out of the rain forest having bumped their heads on branches or twisted their ankles on uneven ground.  Formic acid which the ants use as a defence mechanism is also a mutagen so look out for Wolverine style super heroes arising in North Queensland in the coming years.

After attempts to destroy the ants in hand to hand combat proved unsuccessful the Authority decided to commit war crimes.  Poison is now the preferred method of operation and has the advantage of actually working.  The Authority was quietly confident that a few more years of atrocities would have the ants under control (by "under control" I mean "dead").  Unfortunately it appears that the state and federal governments have enough problems with the United Nations without having to admit that they've been deploying a weapon of mass destruction to deal with our latest threat to border security.  Funding for the next batch of poison has not yet been authorised and the Wet Tropics Management Authority is looking at increasingly bare shelves and trembling for the future.  Specifically their own future.  If the ants wipe out the rain forest it is unlikely we'll need a Wet Tropics Management Authority once we've run out of wet tropics.

I'm actually quite fond of rain forest. It's lush, rich in biodiversity (that means lots of plants and animals and stuff I think) and quite decorative from a distance.  Best of all I don't live in or near any of it.  So I'm hoping that the Authority gets its money and goes back to killing ants on an industrial scale.  But just in case I've cleared the shelves of my local supermarket of insect repellant.  If the worst happens perhaps my home can be an isolated fortress surrounded by an ant dominated wasteland.  Think of The Walking Dead only with ants.