In for the kill
Armed with an effective weapon to combat the Argentine ant, Flybusters Antiants is inching towards US success.
Thursday, July 21 2011 || Progress report || BY Lesley Springall
Viv Van Dyk admits she’d “kill anything anywhere”. It’s just something she likes doing.
Van Dyk is co-founder of Kiwi pest eradication company Flybusters Antiants and runs the organisation’s biosecurity arm, FBA Consulting, which works closely with governments in the South Pacific.
New Zealand projects include the eradication of the southern saltmarsh mosquito and the highly invasive Argentine ant population from popular island reserve Tiritiri Matangi, off Auckland.
Though the company began by focusing on fly control, ants are Van Dyk’s passion. She talks with something akin to awe about their ability to adapt and their complex social structure. And top of the ant ladder here is the Argentine ant.
New Zealand first noticed its Argentine ant problem in the early 1990s. Now these small, light brown ants are endemic in our cities. Highly aggressive, Argentine ant colonies can combine into super colonies that can smother and eat bird chicks, lizards and other insects. They are also highly efficient aphid farmers — the aphids are farmed for their sugar excretions — reeking havoc among our native plant species. And they’re smart. Traditional ant baits don’t work with the Argentine ant because the queen quickly works out something isn’t right and signals the other ants in the colony to stop eating the food source.
“There was just nothing around that could control it,” recalls Van Dyk. “I certainly lost a lot of money trying to develop treatments that would fix it.”
But several years ago Australian agriculture researcher Peter Davis found an effective formula. FBA Consulting worked with Landcare Research to trial the new bait before using it to tackle Tiritiri Matangi’s ant problem. Flybusters was impressed and soon volunteered to manufacture the product — Xstinguish — under licence, Van Dyk says. With projects on Great Barrier Island, Kawau Island and Norfolk Island the ant’s been keeping her busy ever since.
Van Dyk has always aspired to export but time and financial constraints haven’t allowed her to. So she was excited when a US conservation organisation asked her to attend a meeting in October 2009 to discuss the Argentine ant problem on one of Southern California’s island reserves.
It soon became apparent no one else had a way to eradicate the ant, she says. Since then she’s been back twice — once to prove her skills and the second time with a team from FBA to get a handle on the size of the problem they’re facing — a difficult ask in the tough, desert-like conditions of the island. It’s so hot, she says, “it was like living in a hair dryer”.
The working environment is the least of FBA’s problems. The meeting was more than 18 months ago, but eradication is still to begin.
Things move slowly in the US, says Van Dyk. “It’s a highly litigious country. It’s not just as simple as going up there and throwing some bait out.”
Flybusters can’t just export Xstinguish to the US, because it’s not permitted. In fact the manufacture of toxins is so tightly controlled in the US that FBA can’t even pay a US factory to manufacture it. Everything has to be approved and triple approved through the US Environmental Protection Agency. The process is expensive and time consuming and would be impossible for Van Dyk to do without the backing of a US chemical company. But even that’s fraught with problems. FBA has to woo the chemical company to keep it on side.
It is undertaking new trials of Xstinguish so everything can be assessed in a language the people from the factory are used to. Everything is so sensitive that Van Dyk’s not allowed to release the name of the chemical company involved or even the island she’ll be working on. “There’s a lot of protection within this type of industry, so if you want the work you just have to go along with it. Americans like to control things.”
The silver lining, apart from the eradication project itself, is that California has some of the strictest rules governing toxins in the US. So theoretically, once FBA has conquered California, there should be little stopping exporting further afield in the US. Until then, it’s a case of “dotting all the is and crossing all the ts”, says Van Dyk. And killing the ants.
