A PROPERTY owner near Gatton in the Lockyer Valley recently caught a so-called fire ant team on a tree camera digging holes and dropping fire ants in them.

Cairns News has been told by a source who spoke to the property owner (not the man pictured above) that he called police and the five men in the team were arrested. It is not known if the men have been charged because the-then State Labor Government did its best to shut the incident down.

According to the property owner, the State Government issued a court suppression order stopping public distribution of the footage from the tree camera. The source told Cairns News he was waiting for more information from the property owner, who he said had fallen ill and was incapacitated.

He said the team members told police that they were acting according to instructions and showed documents allegedly in support of that claim. Our source agreed that it seemed like someone in the program was trying to create extra work to keep contract money rolling in.

Our source said another man at Inglewood had visually spotted a team planting fire ants but did not have the incident on camera.

The planting allegations against the so-called control teams have added to the scandal around the methods of poisoning the ants. Aerial contractors have raised serious alarm among property owners by spreading large amounts of the highly toxic fire ant bait across farms and into waterways.

A Lockyer Valley man Trevor Hold, who breeds Galloway cattle, has launched a campaign against the poisoning campaign involving pyriproxyfren and s-methoprene, which he blames for the deaths of cows on his property. He says the chemicals affect the embryos and foetus development of calves.

This created miscarriages but if calves make it through to birth, they die prematurely from liver poisoning and cognitive decline over six weeks. Last August Mr Hold began a media campaign against the National Fire Ant Eradication Program, and told local media he would block eradication teams from entering his property. He advocates killing the ants by injecting hot water directly into nests.

The National Fire Ant Eradication Program is a national multi-million-dollar program funded by all Australian state and territory governments, and the Federal Government, and delivered by Biosecurity Queensland.

Queensland began its fire ant eradication program in 2001 – more than two decades ago. According to media reports it has cost more than $1.2 billion.

It is clear that the program did not achieve eradication, but given the scale of the national program, it is now being touted as an environmental crisis in South East Queensland and Northern NSW, hence the use of aerial poison drops.

Sarah McGuire from Samford, west of Brisbane, took water samples from local wetlands where the poison had been dropped and found high levels of the pyriproxyfren and s-methoprene.

Use of the poisons in Queensland has been criticised by a biologist, Professor Joshua King, of the University of Central Florida, who, in an open letter, called the process unsustainable, excessively expensive and contributing to the spread of the ants.