I recently came across this article, and noticed in the title that they kept referring to an invasion of golden fire ants, a name usually reserved for S. aurea.
Solenopsis aurea is a native U.S. species and isn’t known to be invasive. In fact, it belongs to the geminata group—native fire ants that have been having some troubke recently with the saevissima group in the U.S. (Though, ironically, S. geminata is invasive elsewhere, like Southeast Asia).
If the journalists actually identified the correct species, a native ant behaving invasively would be a massive ecological shift and a major scientific milestone. Sucks that the article didn’t mention latin binomials though. It pisses me the hell off when they pull that.
But does anybody have more details. I would love to know if my girl aurea is finally getting some action. Though it sucks that we have more invasive Solenopsis in the world.
journalists don’t do this sort of identification. they typically will report what others say. in this case, the article talks about the Ministry of Environment being the source for the information.
a simple web search for “kobe ministry of environment survey ants” turns up a press release by the Ministry of Environment on 2026-08-04 for Solenopsis invicta found at Port Island, but your article talks about a discovery reported on 2026-09-25. so then it’s simple to trace back from the 2026-08-04 press release to a list of City of Kobe press releases, and then from there, you can find a relevant press release from 2026-09-25: https://www.city.kobe.lg.jp/a66324/922409098751.html.
these days when everything is published online, it should almost always be relatively straightforward to trace back to the original source for any artcile like this.