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The spread of the glassy ant infestation across Taiwan leaves farmers helpless, with the government turning a blind eye

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The glassy ant army bears down, farmers endure in silence with no way out! The ant plague spreads across Taiwan, the government turns a blind eye

The spiny-breasted glassy ant (Ochetellus glaber, "glassy ant") is running rampant, making life unbearable for every farmer in Xihu, Miaoli! This ant not only bites people - even fully covered, it can still slip into the gaps in clothing - it also sprays formic acid, stinging farmers' eyes so badly they cannot open them, and even causing difficulty breathing.

In recent years the spiny-breasted glassy ant has exploded in number across central and southern Taiwan, harassing residents and disrupting farm work, but the duties of the central government's various ministries are unclear, and local governments lack resources, creating a gray zone where no one takes responsibility, causing the ant plague to worsen.

The glassy ant army bears down, farmers cannot bear the nuisance

"Harvesting now takes more than twice as long!" says Xihu farmer Zhang Zhongzhi. Where they used to simply cut the fruit straight off, now they first have to use a pair of long-handled shears to snip the pomelo down, place it on the ground, and then use an air blow gun to blow the ants off each piece of fruit one by one.

Another farmer, Zhang Jiarong, is also suffering badly. Near his home he planted an Asian pear orchard, and the protective bags on the pears have become ready-made mansions for the glassy ants. Braving the ants' attacks, he unties the bags from the trees, and swarms of ants pour out of them. The ants also invade homes, making life unbearable.

Longdong Village in Xihu, Miaoli, began moving toward becoming an organic village ten years ago. Pomelo and white pomelo and other citrus are its specialty crops, and now the village has one more specialty: the spiny-breasted glassy ant. The undersides of the large leaves of the pomelo trees are exactly the place this ant loves most to build its nests and gather.

Conventional farming just sprays insecticide to deal with them, but organic farmers cannot do this, so they have no choice but to endure the harassment - which gets worse every year. Moreover, this ant does not directly harm the fruit; the Asian pears and pomelos mentioned above remain intact, so it does not count as an "agricultural pest," and there is simply no recommended pesticide for it.

Asian pears covered with glassy ants (photo / Cai Jiashan)

Forming "supercolonies" with explosive outbreaks, nests are scattered and hard to control

The spiny-breasted glassy ant is mostly distributed across central and southern Taiwan, and in the past five years the damage has grown increasingly severe, not only hindering work in orchards but also marching straight into homes to cause trouble. Ant expert Lin Zongqi, a professor in the Department of Biology at National Changhua University of Education, says that about seven or eight years ago he began receiving reports from people in the south about the spiny-breasted glassy ant, and afterward it kept expanding, with damage appearing one after another in Chiayi, Nantou, Miaoli and Hsinchu. "Although this ant appears in historical records, its colony pattern was not like this before; now it has become an explosive kind of harm."

Lin Zongqi explains that the spiny-breasted glassy ant now occupies territory in the form of "supercolonies," meaning that within a range of several hundred to several thousand square meters there are tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand queens, and all of them count as ants of the same nest, recognizing each other on sight, not fighting, and even helping one another.

This is also why controlling the spiny-breasted glassy ant is especially difficult: unlike other ants, it does not have a fixed, concentrated nest with an obvious target to strike. "They belong to temporary nests, all living in the gaps of plants," for example cracks in bamboo tubes, the undersides of leaves, gaps in sheet metal, the insides of water pipes - scattered everywhere. When they migrate, "it's like nomadic peoples; when the other ants move, the queens move along with them." So when people kill ants, they can often only wipe out a small part of the enormous colony.

Moreover, the spiny-breasted glassy ant is an arboreal ant; unlike ground-dwelling ants, they like to crawl everywhere along electrical wires and water pipes. If insecticide is sprayed to control them, they will flee when they smell the strong repellent odor, and at this point the wires and pipes become "expressways," and the ants instead use them to expand their territory and reach the places where humans live. "Often when one household sprays, the ants run to the neighbor's place, and then it becomes two households, then ten, and the more you spray the wider it spreads," Lin Zongqi says helplessly.

The spiny-breasted glassy ant builds its nest on the underside of luffa leaves (photo / Cai Jiashan)
The spiny-breasted glassy ant can build its nest right on the underside of fruit tree leaves (image provided by Zhang Zhongzhi)

It lives symbiotically with aphids and scale insects, and even drives away natural enemies, indirectly harming crops

The reasons for the massive outbreak of the ant plague still need to be clarified. Xu Fengquan, a doctoral student at National Taiwan University's Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who studies the spiny-breasted glassy ant, believes it may be that food resources in the environment have increased - that is, the honeydew secreted by aphids and scale insects. If these insects are not controlled frequently, their populations grow and attract ants. In addition, the hotter the climate becomes, the more the reproduction speed and hatching numbers of insects increase.

What is certain, however, is that "ants boost the numbers of aphids and scale insects, and this needs to be taken seriously as well," Xu Fengquan says. On many crops such as pomelo, banana, lemon, sugar apple and longan, the spiny-breasted glassy ant is often seen living symbiotically with aphids and scale insects. Dense swarms of glassy ants protect the pests and hinder natural enemies from preying on them. For example, if a ladybug wants to eat scale insects, the glassy ants will spray formic acid with their mandibles to drive the ladybug away.

So although the spiny-breasted glassy ant does not directly chew on and harm crops, it may indirectly cause agricultural losses. But agricultural authorities have not classified it as a pest, and the resources devoted to controlling it are limited, while environmental protection authorities consider it a household pest that the public should deal with themselves. And the glassy ant does not transmit diseases, unlike the dengue fever vector mosquitoes that the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Centers for Disease Control takes charge of. The result of no one taking responsibility is that the glassy ant captures territory on a large scale, growing more brazen every year, while local governments are short of funds and cannot even afford to buy pesticide, making large-scale control impossible.

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