ABSTRACT
Concern and contestation over animal numbers relate not only to human perceptions of excess but also to competing ideas of which biological or chemical agents ought to be found in the environments we inhabit. In post-World War II Sydney, Australia, the Argentine ant was figured as a tenacious invader of domestic space and subject to a systematic campaign of extermination. This chapter outlines the progress of this campaign, from its roots in transnational economic entomology in the early twentieth century to its cessation in the mid-1980s. During this period, a dedicated bureaucratic organ – the Argentine Ant Eradication Committee – oversaw a special unit of experts and technicians who applied dieldrin and chlordane to sites across the Sydney metropolitan area and beyond. The campaign used print and broadcast media, popular culture and a paid bounty on ant sightings to spur citizen-scientists to identify the “yellow-brown and fiendish” ant. The end of the campaign was part of a shift towards an ecologically informed environmentalism with an interest in native species and environments and a powerful aversion to organochloride pesticide use.
