This article is from 2015. It looks like this year (2021) they announced that they have removed all of the ants from Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge: https://lmtribune.com/outdoors/crazy-ant-strike-team-complet...

Thanks! We've changed the URL to that from https://www.audubon.org/magazine/july-august-2015/one-remote....

Edit: changed back since people made reasonable objections.

The new URL is not available from Europe (http errorcode 451). This works though: https://archive.st/archive/2021/8/lmtribune.com/dxk9/lmtribu...

Is that really the right thing to do? The original article was interesting on its own merits. It’s a good follow up that the teams have been successful, but that link probably should just be pinned as a top comment reply.

I'm curious. The 2015 article said they'd killed 99% of the ants, but it took 6 more years to kill the rest? There's more to the story.

Like they said, a single ant queen can spawn a new mega colony, and there where more then just one or two queens involved.

Besides that in the same way they initially can to the island they might come there again so it's not over, just paused ;=)

It's like software delivery. You're always 80% done!

Sounds like something I would have signed up for as a fresh college grad who wasn't quite ready to join corporate America.

Video tour of the island by one of the volunteers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrRfIbuwFf0

Here's a similar story about eliminating Argentine ants from Santa Cruz Island (near Los Angeles, California):

http://www.californiaislands.net/argentine-ants

The page was last updated in 2016. I'm not sure of the current status of the project.

with ants

Well that's horrifying.

I agree.

I also sense a desperate Hollywood clinging to this as a "reboot" to 'Them!'.

Time to re-read "Leiningen Versus the Ants". http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html

The ants arrived on driftwood, it doesn't seem like there was any unnatural cause.

By trying to save these seabirds, they are actually messing with nature and the evolutionary process of the island.

But helping the overall ecosystem of the planet. We’ve made it very difficult for birds and other animals.

It’s ok to pick winners when you’ve already broken everything past the point where it’s a healthy planet.

Especially when you've unnaturally extended out the atoll multiple times, making it easier for the invasive ants to get a foothold in these endangered bird's natural habitat.

I don't really feel that maintaining the bird population above the plutonium and chemical weapons landfill really moves the needle on the global ecosystem either way.

This is a vanity project. If they were serious about the global ecosystem they wouldn't be considering insecticides.

>I don't really feel that maintaining the bird population above the plutonium and chemical weapons landfill really moves the needle on the global ecosystem either way.

Oh, you don't feel that way huh? Never mind little details like

>"Today more than 5,700 tropicbird pairs nest on the island, or nearly half the estimated global population."

Half the global population left! But what is that in the face of your feelings? 6 months of intense brutal lonely activity, volunteered in a hazardous zone with little hope of any outside support, that has been extremely successful, and it's a "vanity project"!? If they were serious!?!? Really :(? I've volunteered for hurricane clean up in terrible totaled mobile parks that were some of the most unpleasant conditions I've ever faced in my life but they were a lot less harsh than this sounds. I got to go home at the end of the day for one. Perhaps if humans hadn't introduced rats and destroyed/taken over habitats for birds worldwide ants sometimes drifting onto an island would be a different thing, but as other comments have said we have. Your comment is upsetting and horribly uncharitable.

> Oh, you don't feel that way huh?

> But what is that in the face of your feelings?

You know damn well that was a idiomatic way of saying "according to my not-necessarily-infalliable estimation of the relevant information".

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The work of those young volunteers is worthy of our respect and gratitude. Thank you to them and you!

Human activity currently puts about a million species at risk of extinction [1]. I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

Aggressively spraying poisons into the environment has decimated insect populations across the globe and, consequently is also thought to threaten bird populations which eat these insects. It is a short-sighted solution.

The harshness of the conditions for the humans choosing to do this task really has no bearing whatsoever on the task's impact on the global ecosystem. For someone so critical of feelings, that's quite an emotional appeal you have going there.

[1] https://www-nature-com.mines.idm.oclc.org/articles/d41586-01...

Some things can only be saved with insecticide in a remote island. That there are “millions” of other threatened species scattered across the globe with all sorts of micro/macro solutions (or lack thereof), is a nonsequiter.

All you seem to be doing is nitpicking a specific small action despite its clearly defined goal and success, when you can’t even be bothered to propose a concrete alternative action that would do better with the same resources. Just vagaries and platitudes like “insecticide bad in general”.

> Some things can only be saved with insecticide

So you can say, with absolute confidence, that no other conceivable solution could ever have been effective? I don't know if I'm that confident about anything.

I don't agree with the defined goal or the method; it's more than just a nitpick. My concrete alternative would probably be to do nothing. Or try to mitigate climate change. And insecticides ~are~ bad in general.

I think of it like chemo: sometimes you have to use poison to achieve a goal. Apparently this summer they declared victory over the ants.

> I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

You have a point. I hate the feel good videos of people rescuing individual koalas from the Australian bush fires and putting ointment on their burns. We've fucked up their entire ecosystem and now we pick one of them and treat it to assuage the sad feelings of millions of humans? Give me a break.

It matters to this one.

> Human activity currently puts about a million species at risk of extinction [1]. I don't feel picking a few, coincidentally aesthetically pleasing species as winners really moves the needle in terms of the health of the global ecosystem.

False dichotomy.

We need grass-roots intervention and macro political intervention. One does not detract from the other.

> Notorious invaders likely native to West Africa or perhaps Asia, crazy ants cross the high seas on driftwood or as stowaways on vessels...

It doesn't seem to mention which is the culprit in this case, but it may be an unnatural cause after all - especially given the distance to this island.

Yeah but I don’t give a fuck about nature doing natural things. I give a lot of fucks about ensuring that eco diversity is preserved and right now that means hill climbing. I’m okay with local optima because I know mankind survived in one.

Birds are cute. Ants are creepy.

This is the current evolutionary force. Over time, all life on Earth will evolve to be cute.

Technically, we're part of the natural ecosystem as well...

Post-Green revolution that's very debatable. We've developed tech to basically exempt ourselves from natural processes and ecosystems. For now at least...

but birds outrank ants.