Listen to this week’s feature: All Queens Must Die

This week, we published Ryan Bradley’s engrossing feature All Queens Must Die. In popular lingo, the story is a “longread.” Many people have had time to enjoy this deep dive that begins with the annihilation of an ant colony and expands to the power and purpose of nature conservation. But other people, for whatever reason, may have held off because they’d prefer listening to the tale.

Good news: this week’s feature is available as a half-hour recording on SoundCloud. We want to thank David Carlson, who not only took the time to record a reading of the feature, but did a most excellent job.

To whet your appetite, here’s a brief excerpt — one short enough for everybody to read:

How do you eradicate tens of millions, if not billions, of tiny insects that live under several dozen square miles of extremely rugged terrain? Killing each ant would be an impossible task. But kill the queen and you initiate a colony collapse, for the queen is the only source of new ants. Only, Argentine ant colonies often boast several queens, so even the ant’s central weakness required a comprehensive plan of attack: Boser needed to poison all the queens at once. If she did that, Santa Cruz would be one step closer to perfection.