Fire Ants Are Invading Hawaii, so Helicopters Are Blasting Them With Birth Control

pants and ants in our pants pants pants ants in our pants [Music] today we sprayed birth control from helicopters to kill ants little fire ants are one of the world's worst invasive species they are one of top 100 worst species of the world there's two ant species that are especially harmful to Hawaii's plants and animals we really have to figure out a way to control them or we're not gonna have anything left ready in three two one Frank looking good stay on that trajectory that's good quick ants equip the Hawaii has a really big little problem invasive ants there are billions of ants in the islands there are no ants native to the Hawaiian Islands over 50 species have been introduced by humans they are an environmental disaster to ant species are particularly damaging first there are yellow crazy ants the yellow crazy ants spray of toxic formic acid that disables their prey they threaten native species like Hawaii's and dangered bees they compete for floral resources like pollen and nectar yellow crazy ants will also plunder yellow-faced be nest so they'll actually remove larvae and remove all the pollen then there are little fire ants LFA what does that really stand for it little fire ant or little in because these ants are they eliminate all other insects within their territory impacts of that could be plants don't have their pollinators leaf litter doesn't decompose into soil but this isn't just a bug on bug problem LFA are also a menace to people pets and agriculture it was like a whole piece of my body was getting lit on fire they'll live in the trees they will fall down onto the farmworkers and sting them and the farm workers do not want to come back can sing your pets in the eyes causing a clouding of the cornea and that can potentially lead to blindness they make life terrible for people Hawaii's rugged terrain makes ants really hard to eradicate from the ground so conservationists have gotten creative with their extermination approaches we built what we call ant sting wishers we've had a paintball air canister that we would fill with bait we tried water balloon cannons but nothing really seemed to work now ant experts think they've found a new solution little fire ants are out of control on Hawaii's Big Island but on Maui where infestations are more isolated conservationists think they still have a shot at eradication to survey for little fire ants you take a little vial with peanut butter in it place it on the ground for like a half an hour or so come back to it if there's ants in there we recorded in our GPS so we have a point that corresponds to that location once you have all the points you've collected that are positive for little fire ants you can make a map and that's how you know the infested area to come back and do your treatments in an effective manner Wow see all those ants like dust I have been here at Maui invasive species committee for a long time now I started in 2004 eradication is tricky and sometimes it takes a really long time we're working until the job is done being a native Hawaiian the foundation of our culture and what it is to be Hawaiian is our connection to aina to the land it was a no-brainer to help be a part of the solution to eradicate these pests because not only are they harmful and they hurt but from a Hawaiians perspective it could forever change the course of the way we live here in our homeland my property right now is not infested since I know of an infestation it's my kuleana or my responsibility to make sure I'm not you know writing ads to my property we are working to quickly control these infestations when they're discovered so that they don't spread out and infest Maui like they are on the Big Island [Music] once an infested area has been mapped out the team can treat it with bait our active ingredient is non toxic and is kind of like birth control so it makes the queen stop laying eggs the formula that we're using includes water vegetable oil a protein which beef liver powder or peanut butter a food thickener it's not very tasty I don't like it the ants love it the ant team is done with the potato cannons now they're using helicopters [Music] we were able to get permitting so that we could put this out in the environment it's non-toxic even to the ants themselves and so has very low impact on the environment okay I'm coming up [Music] all right here we ready tell me when you start and begin with Brian cool beautiful pattern this morning as long as we continue to feed that to the ants every six weeks the Queens will no longer reproduce and eventually workers will begin to die of old age and so will the Queens themselves tell me when you're done spraying and I'm trying to get the clip hear it yep the goal of the helicopter is to color in if you will using our GPS tracking the entire polygon that represents that infested area and deliver our bait evenly throughout that whole area we have to do that every six weeks for at least a year before we go back in to survey and see how things went they live all the way in the very top of the tallest trees the bait will drip down from that canopy down onto the ground so we're able to treat the entire area three-dimensional it was exciting and rewarding I I knew watching the helicopter fly away each time it went off it was helping address this problem [Music] the first helicopter applications began in October of 2019 potentially it is a model that could serve to help others develop plans to eradicate other ant species even if they're able to kill most of the ants it's hard to know if every last one is gone that's why one nonprofit is sniffing out ants in a new way whenever they veer off to the side we pay close attention because it could mean that they're catching some kind of target odor Kyoko Johnson trains dogs to find invasive species using their sense of smell today she sandy sue and Ruger are searching for invasive devil weed the dogs can typically cover a large area more quickly than a human can they're also useful for targets that are not visible maybe it's a fungus or maybe it's a tiny plant that is very hard to seek you just did like a big u-turn so I think that oh yeah that is it that's it good boy so I'm gonna take a GPS point of this cocoa has been training dogs to find devil weed since last summer now she's taking on yellow crazy ants - they're yellow and they're batshit crazy you can see there's a lot of ants here I can actually feel my skin burn just a little bit with this many ants will make yellow crazy ants can reach these really high densities and they overwhelm animals on the ground and so we're gonna continue to lose all these extremely special and amazing species as yellow crazy ants expand their range and as they go upslope as the climate warms it gets warmer ants are able to go in higher elevations oh one of them's crawling down my pants right up to train the dogs cocoa needs to collect a whole bunch of ants once we got them out of the field those ants were provisioned with a protein and sugar water hopefully they're all dead [Music] eventually Coco will lead the dogs through imprinting drills to learn the ants scent and find them in the wild enesta he was supposed to be a search-and-rescue dog but he switched careers find it there are a lot of similarities in the way that law enforcement detection dogs are trained versus conservation detection dogs good boy I think what makes conservation training a little bit more challenging is that every target is very different find it it's very fascinating to think about how a dog can detect not only just ants in general but how a dog can detect different ant species its hypothesize that they're able to do that because even though the ants all are producing formic acid voice it they also have certain volatile compounds that are associated with each species and so that would in fact mean that for a dog ant species smell different I would think it'd be amazing if I could smell different ant species thinking about easy my job would be like I could just go into an area and just I smell tropical fire ants and now I'm gonna go have a beer once eradication efforts have killed as many ants as possible the dogs will make sure they're really all gone using conservation dogs to detect ant species as is new especially here in the Hawaiian Islands we haven't done it before but I'm really optimistic about you know how these conservation dogs can be used in the future not only on ants but on a variety of other species as well [Music] [Laughter] I spent a long time studying invasive ants and I also used to be held down in tropical fire ant nests when I was little by my brother and so I feel like in some ways I've come full circle I hated ants so much when I was little and then I went through this stage where I killed a bunch of ants I eradicated ants from entire islands here in Hawaii and now I just feel a respect for ants and I feel a sadness for all invasive animals that were focused on killing their living beings and we as humans have introduced them and it is our responsibility to get rid of them but you know I do feel feelings of sadness for for killing anything I'm a biologist I study life you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 1,287,203

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, fire ants, little fire ants, helicopters, vice news 2020, ant invasion, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, war on ants, conservation, extreme fieldwork, hawaii ant attack, nature documentary, planet animal, feral animals, army of ants, empire of ants, ants canada, ants vs humans, climate change, global warming, hawaii documentary, anthill, alien ants, worldnews, National geographic, Murder hornet

Id: tuh9gDQW3uw

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020