The Silent Forest
Did you read my last post about the birds of Guam (called The Silent Forest)? What is being done about this situation?
Parachuting Mice
This week 2,000 paratroopers descended to the forests of Guam to do battle with the Brown Tree Snake. If you think that is strange – read on. The paratroopers are mice. Dead mice! The mice are injected with acetaminophen; an ingredient found in painkillers. This drug is harmless to most animals but deadly to snakes.
The parachutes are actually a streamer with a cardboard square on each end. As the cardboard is heavier than the tissue-paper streamer, the ends descend first and the streamer, in the centre, billows out like a parachute – strong enough to support a mouse. The idea is that the parachute will get tangled in the tree branches and will be eaten by the snakes. The mouse that is, not the parachute. Although if they are attached together, the snake might have to eat the parachute as well. Perhaps they are edible parachutes. Maybe even in different flavours!
Dead Mice with Radios
A crazy story? Wait, I’m not finished. How will they know if the mission is successful? When I was a paratrooper in the Canadian Army, I was the radio operator, so I had to jump with a radio in addition to all the normal gear that the other soldiers had to take. Likewise in the dead mouse army; some of the mice have radios. The radios will send information back to the organizers to report on the situation. Not sure exactly how that will work. Imagine getting this message, “Mission successful, I have been eaten by a snake!”
Operation Paramouse will cost the government eight million dollars. They are also spending another one million dollars annually to search all outgoing cargo with specially trained dogs that sniff out the snakes. There is a deadly fear that the Brown Tree Snakes will reach Hawaii and other islands and cause the same devastation as they did on Guam. A few Brown Tree Snakes have been found in Hawaii but they were killed and they are not believed to be breeding there. But all it would take is one pregnant female to establish the snakes on the island.
The Brown Tree Snake
Why don’t they just trap the snakes, you say? For one thing, there are too many of them. Guam has one of the highest snake densities in the world. For another reason, the snakes are reclusive and nocturnal; they live in the treetops and are difficult to find.
The Effect of the Brown Tree Snake on Guam
The Brown Tree Snake has almost wiped out the forest birds on Guam and is also costing four million dollars annually in lost revenue. They get into transformers and cause power outages as they electrocute themselves. This happens about once every three days in Guam.
Tourism is down. Who wants to go to an island inhabited by snakes and spiders and no birds! Shipping costs more as everything has to be checked for snakes. If the 2,000 mice are successful in killing 2,000 Brown Tree Snakes, it will only leave about two million more to kill. This sounds like a comedy sketch but it is serious business. It is too bad that they didn’t do something about the Brown Tree Snake in the 1960s before there were millions of them on Guam and the birds became extinct.
Update 2018
This program was originally launched in 2013. The snakes do eat the mice but no results of the overall effect have been published. But another problem for Guam has arisen. Due to the lack of birds and bats that once populated the island, the seeds of the trees are not being dispersed as they once were. The result is that the growth of new trees is down by almost 90%.
The latest survey shows that there are still about two million Brown Tree Snakes on Guam. That is 5,000 per sq kilometre (or 13,000 per square mile).