The Newmarket women’s football side was gearing up for its clash against crosstown club New Farm United in Brisbane’s inner northern suburbs on Saturday morning when a message pinged in the team’s group chat.
Just hours before kick-off, the game was postponed, to a date undetermined.
“We didn’t know why,” coach Craig Hughes says. “It rained overnight on Friday, but I thought: ‘Oh, really? It didn’t rain that much.’”
Later, the team would learn that wet weather was not the direct cause of the game’s 11th-hour cancellation – it was ants.
A journal article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from 2022 considers the “astounding ubiquity of ants” upon Earth, before calculating a conservative estimate of their global population at 20 quadrillion – a ludicrously made-up-sounding figure which constitutes a biomass exceeding that of wild birds and mammals combined.
A single ant’s nest, therefore, might seem to be a curious cause for alarm.
This, however, was no ordinary nest. It belonged to what federal government authorities describe as “one of the worst invasive species to reach Australia” and one, they warn, that threatens to change the country’s ecosystems, industries and way of life irrevocably: the red imported fire ant.
Fire ants are described as a “social menace” – 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.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailBut Hughes’s team were unaware they were on the frontline of what has been called the largest ant eradication effort the world has ever seen.
A lot of sad face emojis dotted the team chat on Saturday morning, Hughes says.
“It’s a bit upsetting, because the girls train pretty hard during the week – they wanna play,” the coach says. “And they organise their work shifts and social lives around the games.”
In recent days and weeks, sporting clubs across south-east Queensland 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.
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 – having possibly arrived sometime in the 1980s.
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 – without those efforts, it wrote, “fire ants would most likely spread to most of Australia by now”.
But that was “a crisis year”.
In 2023, fire ants broke containment zones with frequency, being found south of the Queensland border and west of the Great Dividing Range.
“These are signs that the fire ant containment dam is cracking,” the council wrote.
Since then, fire ants have been found 800km from the containment zone 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.
The infestation now covers more than 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres) – an area equivalent to the size of greater Sydney.
Still, for some, there was something unsettling about the fire ants popping up in New Farm Park.
The heritage-listed public park, on a bend in the Brisbane River, is one of the city’s largest and most significant public spaces.
International visitors to Brisbane are greeted with a picture of the park with its jacarandas in bloom upon their arrival to the airport.
So deeply enmeshed in the Brisbane psyche is New Farm Park, it is the setting of a Bluey episode.
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.
New Farm is an “iconic location” in Brisbane, Pianta says. “If we don’t eradicate fire ants this is going to happen everywhere in the country. Brisbane is getting a taste of it now.”
But Southern Cross University entomologist, professor Nigel Andrew, says eradication of fire ants, using current techniques, is already out of the question.
Andrew is the author of a recent study published in Austral Ecology that criticises the large-scale use of non-specific pesticides deployed across swathes of the south-east in the fire ant fight.
He says a fire ant nest in New Farm Park was “inevitable” – and warns next spring might bring an outbreak of hundreds more.
“Sporting fields are prime habitat for fire ants,” he says. “They like those environments which we call manicured and they probably look at them as highly disturbed, which is actually perfect.”
Andrew is hopeful that future research may lead to breakthroughs in fire ant suppression. In the meantime, he says, Australians might look to the southern states of the US for a taste of what’s to come.
There, where fire ants have been invading since the 1930s, they are said to cost billions of dollars each year to manage and are far from beloved – a recent Texas Monthly article was called “Why fire ants are even more evil than you thought”.
“But they still play sport in Texas and Florida,” Andrew says.
