iStockphoto / Bruno Uehara
For anyone out there who has lost sleep over the threat posed by the ‘Murder Hornet,’ an invasive hornet species from Japan, you can rest easily now because our national nightmare is over. According to reports, the invasive species has been neutralized.
Talk of ‘Murder Hornets‘ was all the rage back in 2020 when news was moving at the speed of light and when the murder hornet was first making waves in the Pacific Northwest. They were initially found in NW Washington State and the immediate threat was this invasive species would proliferate in the sparsely populated wilderness but that no longer seems to be the case.
The deputy administrator at the U.S.D.A.’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Mark Davidson, told Mike Baker of the NYT “we are proud of this landmark victory in the fight against invasive species.”
In order to eradicate the invasive species, entomologists tracked murder hornets with tiny GPS devices and followed them back to their murder lairs. Once there, the bug specialists rolled up their sleeves and did what was necessary. The NYT says they “moved in to eliminate the nests” while wearing protective clothing and reading between the lines I think we can all imagine what that might’ve looked like, all out warfare against the most-feared species of hornet on earth.
These gargantuan hornets have made headlines from the moment they were discovered. Footage of the nests being removed from the wild have mystified millions on YouTube:
Whilst taking a victory lap on the eradication of murder hornets, officials apparently tempered expectations by saying it is possible that more murder hornets will sneak into the area at some point in the future. And that’s well within the realm of possibility because officials to this day still do not know how the Japanese murder hornets invaded Washington to begin with.
This clip of a murder hornet nest being removed in Washington state three years ago was seen 1.5 million times as word of these giants spread:
Ultimately, bug experts cautioned that murder hornets never posed enough of a threat to elicit nationwide panic. But anyone who ever came across of these absolute units said otherwise… All’s well that ends well, for now. As they appear to have been fully eradicated in the United States.