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Govt To Bomb Guam With Frozen Mice To Kill Snakes
rhettb writes "In a spectacularly creative effort to rid Guam of the brown tree snake, an invasive species which has ravaged local wildlife and angered local residents, the US Department of Agriculture is planning to 'bomb' the island's rainforests with dead frozen mice laced with acetaminophen. While it might not seem difficult to purge an island of snakes, the snake's habit of dwelling high in the rainforest canopy has so far thwarted efforts to rid the island of the pest. Eradicating the snake is a priority because it triggers more than 100 power outages a year at a cost of $1-4 million and has driven at least 6 local bird species to extinction."
They dropped the gorillas to stomp the lions, the dropped the lions to hunt the dogs, the dropped the dogs to chase the cats, they dropped the cats to catch the mice, the dropped the mice to kill the snakes, but I don't know why they swallowed that fly.
For a saint...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
And have a headache, just grab the nearest dead frozen mouse.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I guess all those warnings about how Tylenol can damage your liver are true!
Just spread some rumour to the Chinese that the rare "Guam strain" is good for erectile dysfunction, "general health" or whatever, and it'll soon be close enough to extinction. ;).
When the Ice Zombie Rats who are incapable of feeling pain attack?
Rig snake-zappers midway up the poles? :-)
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I guess all those warnings about how Tylenol can damage your liver are true!
Once the dead snakes are doped on acetaminophen, don't they face the risk of whatever native species might eat them overdosing on acetaminophen? As I've said before, I steer clear of all that crap.
My work here is dung.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Now the entire island will smell like rotting mice and snakes... Good Job USDA.
A large number of birds were omnivorous. Why is this likely only to take out the snakes?
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Then they can drop smarter dead frozen mice to kill them as well. Er, well, or something like that.
I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking island!
Most snakes won't eat carrion. The prey has to be moving to trigger hunting, and then feeding behavior.
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Oh, good. Another slashdolt who thinks natural solution works by magic.
This ploy doesn't select in favor of "wise" snakes. It selects in favor of snakes that have an aversion to the mice for some reason, which is only meaningful if (1) such snakes exist, and (2) the aversion is not correlated with some other factor that limits breeding, and (3) the aversion is genetic.
It is possible that those three things will turn out to be true. Lacking a field test, I guess we don't know if any snakes have an aversion to the bait. It seems unlikely to me, but who knows?
Possible or not, though, it is far from the foregone conclusion you would suggest.
Didn't think so.
... tell me the mice will each have their own little biodegradable parachute to help them get stuck up in the trees where the snakes are.
seems pretty likely to me, a lot of snakes won't eat their prey unless it's moving, this will probably re-enforce that trait.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
What ever happened to just taking off and nuking them from orbit? It's the only way to be sure after all.
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Did you read the summary? While I am sure the results would be brilliant YouTube (or Darwin awards) material, how do you get hundreds of men with shotguns up into the tree canopy?
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that the overflow of mice will cause the island to capsize... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg&t=1m16s
So, what's going to eat the mice other than the snakes?
FTFA:
Initially mice were tested with a variety of 'delivery systems' until researchers with the National Wildlife Researcher Center in Fort Collins, Colorado settled on a streamer attached to cardboard on which the mouse is affixed via glue. This contraption is meant to catch in the tree tops: perfectly positioning itself for hungry brown tree snakes.
Seems like they already figured out the parachute idea.
and as much number 9 or 10 shot shells
Which contain lead. Which will leach into the water table. It's a realistic problem for the quantities you're talking about.
People forget that the simplest solution tends to be the best one. They also forget what a regiment of men with guns can accomplish
And people are also idiots who forget that when a mommy snake and a daddy snake meet by chance in a forest, they have zillions of baby snakes shortly thereafter. Invasive species which are overrunning a habitat are doing so because they have no natural predators and an abundant food source.
Growth is exponential . Unless you have less than 2 snakes remaining, you're screwed in another few years again. And if you only have one, you better make sure it's not pregnant.
Please help metamoderate.
Tell this to Hank Johnson, because now he'll really think that Guam will tip over...
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Much better than men, easily can get into canopies. Can come home to recharge before going out for more hunting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM
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NYC tried this kind of stupid stunt to attack our rats with imported possums. The possums didn't kill the rats, and now Brooklyn is infested with rats and possums.
I expect Guam will remain overrun by snakes, and get overrun by mice. So they'll send in the possums, and Guam will be overrun by snakes, mice and possums.
Why can't we learn that simple attacks on complex problems often just make the problem more complex? Hamfisted slaps at nature always have unintended consequences.
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acetaminophen!? YOUcetaminophen! oh girl! you have no faith in medicine!
An ingenious idea! if it works
Well, either you're right and it won't work at all; or the team that's actually studied the problem and run tests is right and there's a good chance that any such problem has been overcome. (Can you guess whom I think is more likely to know what they're talking about?)
But the ultimate success or failure of the plan is beside the point. Focus. I was responding to a claim about natural selection. The claim was based on elevation of natural selection to a mystical process that will maek a species survive anything that happens. That's not how it works. If you're right, then the species will survive due to a trait that's already dominant; no adaptation required, no temporary period where the plan seems to be working.
In an environment where evolution as a theory is under attack, misrepresenting it as a panacea is a Bad Idea.
"First they came for the snakes,
but I didn't eat because I don't eat Tylenol-laced frozen mice...."
Oh wait, thought this was Y.R.O. ... nevermind.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Legend has it that before trying the whole "standing on a hill, waving a staff and praying a lot" thing, St. Patrick tried bombing Ireland with frozen rodents laced with Tylenol. Sadly, it was quickly discovered that eating these dead mice cured hangovers and the indigenous population got to them before the snakes did, at which point St. Patrick had to resort to miracles. It is not widely known that until quite recently eating various sorts of dead muridae was a folk cure for headaches in Ireland but for some reason it's not been that effective since St. Paddy died, a little over 1,500 years ago.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
It worked really well in Brooklyn.
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I wonder what they think about this.
They sold it to the government! We are such suckers.
Let's just see how the snake population changes when the females no longer have headaches.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
Oh fantastic, so we're creating selection pressure for ADHD? Now we'll have to bomb the island with live kittens laced with Ritalin...
Get these motherf*cking snakes off this motherf*cking island
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Severe withdrawl symptoms from cannabis itself are pretty much unknown. Tobacco, OTOH, is said by many to be as hard or harder to kick than heroin.
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That's the beauty of a shotgun. It can hit stuff from the ground.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
If the snakes live in the canopy, and are wiping out bird populations, maybe some bird baits would be a good addition to the control attempt.
meh, why don't they just have a dude with a staple gun and little packs of tylenol sitting in the back of a cargo plane - just hand him a mouse, staple the acetaminophen to its head, and drop. Or better yet, staple it to their genitals - in case some survive the drop, the staple, and the snakes.
Whatever
This works very well in controlling rabies in wild populations of scavengers and carnivores.
[End Of Line]
I swear to God I thought turkeys could fly....
... I misread acetaminophen for amphetamine and pondered what an island of pissed-off, speed-addled brown tree snakes would look like.
i'd say they have run tests and that the trait is not dominant; this will probably work in the short term. However it is dominant in other species of snakes and given the population density of the snakes i would *guess* it's quite likely that they have a short breeding cycle which would help to encourage it to occur in this species as well, much like a very large portion of rabbits in australia are now resistant to myxomatosis. i mostly hassled you because the guy was probably trying to make a sub-par joke about super-snakes and i wanted to cut them a little slack tho :)
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Send in the Cantonese. -Your Chinese friend.
So that's why Johnson & Johnson McNeil is so happy. They can claim those products were not really intended for human consumption. Of course they also claim acetaminophen is perfectly safe and doesn't cause long term liver damage in humans.
Did nobody point out that most snakes prefer live prey. Especially TREE snakes that generally don't scour the ground looking for food? Sounds like they'll end up killing other animals like birds, but wait aren't they trying to kill the snakes to save the birds?
Rigor Rodents to Rain on Scrappy Snake Scourge Thoroughly Tainted with Tylenol
...FTW
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"If the current experiment works – scientists will know because they’re also packing the dead mice with radio transmitters for the snakes to ingest ..." --
CNN
The tracking radios is an interesting note: Afterall, a mouse-kabob not dangling in a tree could be food for other predators as well and ingested by unintended (nontarget) animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, or monitor lizards. It would be good to track the corpsicle to make sure it is consumed by the target brown tree snakes, and not some other arboreal carrion feeder.
On the other hand, if tracking radio, then why not go whole hog and provide tracking video? Pin hole videocams are a small additional payload and this might make it quicker to verify that the bait is finding its intended target.
Now some bright spark out there is going to catch on really quick: There was a recent TEDtalk where Nathan Myhrvold seriously proposed developing a laser mosquito zapper to prevent diseases carried by mosqueto bites. See: "TED 2010: Death Star Laser Gun Zaps Mosquitoes Dead"
If the key to this whole exercise is to dangle food in trees to find brown tree snakes in trees, then perhaps what is required is a tree monitoring system that detects snake motion in trees and lasers them out of the canopy. The image recognition problem is even simpler with power lines and utility poles, especially since a brown tree snake has a specific IR signature when it is in a tree.
This has to be far easier than shooting down mosquitos, and the image processing requirement is less real-time intensive. Further, combat CO2 laser optics has certainly reached the pinnacle of point-and-shoot, so with an overhead laser platform, an entire forest could be quickly pruned of brown tree snakes -- even if the current population density exceeds 13,000 brown tree snakes per square mile.
It is known that Guamians have developed recipes for roasted brown tree snake meat - so a high-powered laser application could also satisfy human market demands for prepared snake meat.
Re-outfitting a small fleet of Predator UAV drones should allow deployment of a laser-based brown tree snake eradication program within the year while effectively addressing budget constraints of the ongoing brown tree snake control program. Manpower would not require additional UAV pilots stationed on Guam, but could be sourced from mainland US UAV piloting centers and trainees who need to log effective flight time experience before engaging in actual combat missions.
With many available targets automatically selected for pilots to consider, a pilot's principal role will be to prevent mis-identified kills. With a maximum length of 3 meters, pilots will need to make sure that someone's pet python is not accidentally mistaken for a brown tree snake.
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