The Kenting National Park management office on Saturday said it has placed 240 specialized baiting stations in four areas around the park in hopes of eliminating supercolonies of yellow crazy ants.
The management office this year officially entrusted a team of biologists led by National Changhua University of Education biologist Ling Chung-chi (林宗岐) with the task of preventing and treating infestations of yellow crazy ants in Kenting.
According to a report by the office, a supercolony of yellow crazy ants is formed when worker ant colonies from different nests combine without the multiple queen ants attacking each other, which increases the density of the worker ants and improves their competitiveness.
Photo courtesy of Ling Chung-chi
The colonies quickly reach a high density, at which they have an effect on the ecological environment, the report said.
The park’s conservation division and Lin’s team have placed 60 specialized baiting stations each in Shadao (砂島), Banana Bay (香蕉灣), Manjhou Harbor (滿州港口) and along the coastline to eliminate supercolonies.
They plan to reassess the locations each odd-numbered month and research and monitor the situation each even-numbered month.
Stations with plates of bait placed on the ground would attract other organisms and ant species, but yellow crazy ants are more likely to search for food placed higher, office director Liu Pei-tung (劉培東) said.
This year, Lin’s team intentionally increased the number of stations with bait plates that were mounted up in trees, Liu said.
Native to west Africa, the yellow crazy ant entered Taiwan a century ago with imported plants.
Yellow crazy ants feed on crab carcasses. They release formic acid to blind the crabs and render them unable to search for food.
Yellow crazy ants have damaged the habitat of land crabs on Pingtung’s Hengchun Peninsula (恆春半島) and Taichung’s Gaomei Wetlands (高美溼地).
In 2013, the yellow crazy ant was ranked sixth in the 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Invasive Species Specialist Group.
The conservation division has received reports of yellow crazy ant colonies in the region since 2015.
Academics last year discovered that the population of land crabs in Kenting National Park was noticeably decreasing.
The office plans to host volunteer training events in March and April to work with local residents to eliminate yellow crazy ants and protect the area’s crab population, Liu added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching