This is no small thing. Our project to help eradicate yellow crazy ants from northern Queensland has been shortlisted for a 2020 Australian Ethical community grant.
Australian Ethical says our project highlights a deep commitment to our work, displays strong outcomes and clearly articulates how we are tackling this huge task.
We were among 24 projects to be shortlisted from more than 430 applications. That’s a big deal.
The public had a vote on which projects will make the final cut, with voting open from 6 to 26 July 2020 on the Australian Ethical website.
The winner is expected to be announced in early September.
We work across Australia on some of the nation’s most important conservation campaigns. Few are more important than our work to help eradicate yellow crazy ants, which are a fearsome creature, and listed among the 100 worst invasive species in the world.
Yellow crazy ants have a huge impact on our native wildlife, killing and consuming most other ants, insects, lizards, birds and small mammals. They thrive in Queensland’s warm, humid tropics.
One of our greatest fears is that if yellow crazy ants are not eradicated from Nome near Townsville they could threaten Bowling Green Bay National Park, a sanctuary for many threatened species, including northern quolls and the black-throated finch.
This incredible national park also takes in Mt Elliott, home to four species found nowhere else in the world – including the Mt Elliott nursery frog and the Mt Elliott leaf-tailed gecko.
The Bowling Green Bay Ramsar site is also incredibly valuable, providing feeding grounds for the nationally vulnerable green turtle and supporting an abundance of bird species. Substantial numbers of all Australian waterbird groups are regularly found within the Ramsar site, including post-breeding populations of brolgas and magpie geese.
These biodiversity hotspots are integrally connected with the Great Barrier Reef. Anything that tips the ecological balance on land will have repercussions for the reef’s marine life.
Receiving an Australian Ethical Community Grant will be like strapping a turbo charger to our Townsville yellow crazy ant eradication program.
It will make sure we have the funds to:
Yellow crazy ants are one of the world’s worst invasive species. Capable of forming super colonies, they threaten our tropical north, including the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area and the dry tropics, and carry huge social, environmental and financial impacts.
That’s why we have invested years of work into the battle against yellow crazy ants in Queensland.
Our efforts were critical in securing the funding to eradicate an outbreak of the ants in Cairns that threatened Queensland’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.
Our team is now working closely with the City of Townsville to support local control efforts and secure much-needed resources for a full-scale eradication program for Townsville.
Our community coordinator, Bev Job, is focusing on the small suburb of Nome, just south of Townsville, where the ants have been present in the area since 2008.
Two years ago, in 2018, we started coordinating community volunteers to support council treatment efforts. We’re almost there. There have been no detections of yellow crazy ants for the past 18 months, but we still need to keep checking at least until the end of the year.
We have enough funds to keep one person employed at eight hours a week until September, but that’s not enough.
Securing this grant will allow us to support community volunteers to help with delimiting and treating the new infestation next to the national park and to continue the important surveillance work in Nome to confirm the ants are really gone.
Eradication is achievable with the help and dedication of the community.
The Invasive Species Council acknowledges the Traditional Custodians throughout Australia and their connections to land and sea. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. The Invasive Species Council supports voting ‘YES’ for a Voice to Parliament.
Dear Project Team,
[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.]
I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.
The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.
The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.
This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.
Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.
Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.
Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.
I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.
Dear Project Team,
[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.]
I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.
The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.
The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.
This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.
Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.
Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.
Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.
I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.