Invasive brown tree snake

[snake kid]

Hi all So I haven't been posting at all lately but found something interesting today and decided to share it(Hope this is the right section). So I work as a guide at a game lodge ad we often get volunteers from other countries. This last week we had a lady named Mary from USA and she was telling me about what she did back home. She basically does ecological impact studies and Solving problems with invasive species as well as protecting Fauna and Flora.

So knowing that I love snakes she told me about a project in Guam that is going on to eradicate the Brown tree snake which if my mind serves me correct is native to Australia. It is a semi Venomous snake and eats birds, birds eggs, frogs and gecko's. They have invaded in Guam and are really becoming a problem. (For those of you that suck in Geography Guam is a little island close to Hawaii) They cause major power outages by climbing into empty light sockets and short circa-ting the power causing factories to loose time and money. They climb into small aircraft's propeller systems and jam them. They are eradicating the birds of that area and already caused local extinction of 7 bird species (Local extinction does't mean they are extinct, only that they do not occur at that locality any more) All this because they have no Natural predators and their numbers are increasing to large extensiveness.

They are using I think she said 6 million or something like that dollars per year to try and solve this problem. And she mentioned a bizarre way that they are doing it. They fill dead baby mice with a drug end then drop them out of planes over the forests. The drug causes them to go into a coma and then die. I found this to be very interesting so just thought i'd share. Here are some interesting links that I found.

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161432056 ... pidery-web This is just about the impact the snakes have on some of the Fauna.
http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/anim ... NHub-STwek Some info on the snake as well as its status.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... e-tylenol/ an article about the mice being air dropped.

Hope you enjoy.

[Rodwraylva]

That is kinda sad that it has come to that, but I think in that situation it is kind of acceptable, as it is bad for the rest of the ecology of the island. But sometimes people cannot draw the line, what about snakes which eats the mice which are not this brown tree snake? would that not be hazardous to them aswell?

[snake kid]

As far as I understand and have read there are no native snakes in Guam, but I can be wrong. I can assure you they did allot of research but there is always room for error I will not argue with that.

[Scar69]

Very Intresting Read...

Thanks for that

[Eyelash]

Heres a pic of a not so invasive Brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) haha...

[Bushviper]

One frozen Tree snake! Good one Eyelash

There are no snakes on Guam so the only things that eat mice are the invasive tree snakes. It is scary how many of them there are.

[Rodwraylva]

Thanks for the update, so then it is no problem, but still sad that it came to that.