Johnston Atoll: Then and Now
Johnston Atoll is where the members of the Crazy Ant Strike Team call home for six months. But it wasn’t always as we know it now; to get the full picture, we have to look back through history at the atoll’s past. Johnston Atoll first began hosting active US military operations in 1939 and served as a refueling station for planes and submarines during World War II. In the 1960s it was used by the US nuclear testing program for conducting high-altitude nuclear tests, and throughout the 1990s it was the site of the Army’s chemical weapon demilitarization project. Over the years the island has been subject to a variety of chemical contaminants, including Agent Orange that leaked into the soil, large amounts of buried asbestos, and radioactive contamination from a rocket that exploded on the launch pad (which was subsequently cleaned up). By 2004 nearly all infrastructure had been removed, all personnel had left the atoll, and Johnston was decommissioned as a military base.
Today, Johnston Atoll remains as a National Wildlife Refuge managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Yellow crazy ants were first documented on Johnston Island in early 2010 when biologists observed ants swarming in extremely high densities over a 135 acre area. It is thought that the ants were unintentionally introduced to the island by a trespassing vessel sometime after the base closed. Ground-nesting seabirds on the island were blinded by the formic acid sprayed by the ants and had almost completely abandoned the area invaded by the YCA supercolony. Johnston Atoll is the only emergent land in over 850,000 square miles of ocean and provides important breeding habitat for many seabird species, making it was paramount that the infestation be controlled and the yellow crazy ants eradicated. And that is what brings us, the Crazy Ant Strike Team, to Johnston Atoll.
