User:CarpZ A Species

https://invasives.org.au/our-work/invasive-insects/ants/yellow-crazy-ants/Yellow crazy ants are on the list of the world’s 100 worst invasive species.

They are a highly aggressive species, and have made their way into Australia through our ports. After first arriving on Christmas island sometime before 1934, yellow crazy ants have since been recorded in Queensland, the Northern Territory and NSW. They now threaten areas like Queensland’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforests on the planet.

Yellow crazy ants do not bite. Instead, they spray formic acid to blind and kill their prey. And although they’re tiny, they can swarm in great numbers, killing much larger animals like lizards, frogs, small mammals, turtle hatchlings and bird chicks and reshaping entire ecosystems.

Overseas, in places like the Johnston Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, yellow crazy ants have killed and deformed large numbers of chicks in seabird colonies by constantly spraying them with acid.

But the numbers and impacts of yellow crazy ants fluctuate depending on local environmental conditions. And northern Queensland’s Wet Tropics just happen to be their ideal habitat. If not stopped in their tracks they could threaten Queensland with economic and ecological disaster, putting the state’s sugar cane and tourism industries  at risk and threatening devastating impacts on local communities.

Yellow ants are pretty much my favourite.

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