All queens must die

Fantastic read not so much for the bits about the Argentine ants, but why biologists are committing genocide.

On Santa Cruz Island, they killed the cows, sheep, and bees. Now it’s time to finish the job.

There was but one invasive animal remaining, the toughest and hardiest creature of them all. For years, no one had figured out how to kill it. For half a century, no one even knew it was there. But it was, in the millions. And now the conservationists turned to face their most tenacious foe: the Argentine ant.

A colony of ants is a very large family of females. The genetic bond between certain colonies of Argentine ants is particularly strong. It’s so strong that a worker from one colony can be plucked up and deposited into another, hundreds of miles away, and she will act as if she’s right at home, surrounded by family, which, in a way, she is. Throughout California, from San Diego to San Francisco, the Argentine ants form one enormous sisterhood, or colony, or supercolony. The California supercolony is known in scientific literature as "the large supercolony." But recent studies suggest that it is even larger than it was long assumed to be. The lineage of the California colony is the same as colonies along the northern Mediterranean coastline and southern Japan. The large supercolony, it turns out, is a global superpower. Decades ago, it made landfall on Santa Cruz Island.

...I asked her why foxes were considered native but the Argentine ants were not. Was the distinction of native vs. invasive simply one of time? "Where do you draw the line?" I asked her. "Do you go back 100 years? Two hundred?"


"No, no," she said. "Naming dates gets you in a lot of trouble, drawing firm lines like that." The best she could do, both as an employee of The Nature Conservancy and an ecologist, was to value biodiversity above all, right up there with the overall health of the ecosystem. The Argentines presented a threat not simply to several ant species, but other types of flora and fauna as well — the flowers that needed their seeds moved by the harvester ants; the bees that were harassed off of flowers run over by Argentines; or the health of the soil, even.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/25/12608928/santa-cruz-island-argentine-ants-extermination-nature-conservancy