The Newmarket women\u2019s football side was gearing up for its clash against crosstown club New Farm United in Brisbane\u2019s inner northern suburbs on Saturday morning when a message pinged in the team\u2019s group chat.<\/p>\n
Just hours before kick-off, the game was postponed, to a date undetermined.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t know why,\u201d coach Craig Hughes says. \u201cIt rained overnight on Friday, but I thought: \u2018Oh, really? It didn\u2019t rain that much.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, the team would learn that wet weather was not the direct cause of the game\u2019s 11th-hour cancellation \u2013 it was ants.<\/p>\n
A journal article<\/a> in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from 2022 considers the \u201castounding ubiquity of ants\u201d upon Earth, before calculating a conservative estimate of their global population at 20 quadrillion \u2013 a ludicrously made-up-sounding figure which constitutes a biomass exceeding that of wild birds and mammals combined.<\/p>\n A single ant\u2019s nest, therefore, might seem to be a curious cause for alarm.<\/p>\n This, however, was no ordinary nest. It belonged to what federal government authorities describe as \u201cone of the worst invasive species to reach Australia<\/a>\u201d and one, they warn, that threatens to change the country\u2019s ecosystems, industries and way of life irrevocably: the red imported fire ant.<\/p>\n Fire ants are described as a \u201csocial menace\u201d \u2013 they are known to swarm aggressively and inflict a sting that can itch and burn for an hour. In rare cases, people have died from allergic reactions.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n But Hughes\u2019s team were unaware they were on the frontline of what has been called the largest ant eradication effort the world has ever seen<\/a>.<\/p>\n A lot of sad face emojis dotted the team chat on Saturday morning, Hughes says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bit upsetting, because the girls train pretty hard during the week \u2013 they wanna play,\u201d the coach says. \u201cAnd they organise their work shifts and social lives around the games.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent days and weeks, sporting clubs across south-east Queensland<\/a> have issued a spate of last-minute cancellations of training sessions and postponement of games due to fire ants, from the Redbank Plains Bears rugby league club in Ipswich, south west of Brisbane, to the Coorparoo Australian rules football club just south of the river, and the bayside Redlands United FC in the south-west.<\/p>\n Fire ant nest in Queensland. Photograph: Jono Searle\/AAP<\/p>\n Fire ants, it seems, are on the march. But though the frontlines may be expanding, this is no new invasion. These ants are from an incursion first detected in Brisbane in 2001 \u2013 having possibly arrived sometime in the 1980s.<\/p>\n In late 2023, the Invasive Species Council of Australia wrote that ongoing suppression had contained the fire ant incursion to an area of about 850,000 hectares in south-east Queensland \u2013 without those efforts, it wrote<\/a>, \u201cfire ants would most likely spread to most of Australia by now\u201d.<\/p>\n But that was \u201ca crisis year\u201d.<\/p>\n In 2023, fire ants broke containment zones with frequency, being found south of the Queensland border and west of the Great Dividing Range.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are signs that the fire ant containment dam is cracking,\u201d the council wrote.<\/p>\n Since then, fire ants have been found 800km from the containment zone<\/a> on mines in central Queensland. Last week, the council said fire ant nests had been detected and destroyed in world heritage rainforest in the Gold Coast hinterland<\/a>.<\/p>\n The infestation now covers more than 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres) \u2013 an area equivalent to the size of greater Sydney.<\/p>\n Still, for some, there was something unsettling about the fire ants popping up in New Farm Park.<\/p>\n The heritage-listed public park, on a bend in the Brisbane River, is one of the city\u2019s largest and most significant public spaces.<\/p>\n International visitors to Brisbane are greeted with a picture of the park with its jacarandas in bloom upon their arrival to the airport.<\/p>\n So deeply enmeshed in the Brisbane psyche is New Farm Park, it is the setting of a Bluey episode.<\/p>\n Blue Jacaranda trees in bloom in New Farm Park, Brisbane. Photograph: Paul Bradley\/Alamy<\/p>\n Reece Pianta, the Invasive Species Council advocacy manager, says state funding for suppression efforts ran out in July and that it was important that it continue.<\/p>\n New Farm is an \u201ciconic location\u201d in Brisbane, Pianta says. \u201cIf we don\u2019t eradicate fire ants this is going to happen everywhere in the country. Brisbane is getting a taste of it now.\u201d<\/p>\n But Southern Cross University entomologist, professor Nigel Andrew, says eradication of fire ants, using current techniques, is already out of the question.<\/p>\n