Bombs Away

When I first saw this story, my immediate reaction was that I could play it up for big laughs. After all, the headline seemed to speak for itself:

U.S. Drops 2,000 Dead Mice by Parachute on Guam

The article went on to say that the $8 million mission was to kill snakes by poisoning the mice with, of all things, acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

This had all the makings of another government boondoggle. U.S. Army helicopters dropping dead rodents, pumped full of headache medicine, by cardboard parachutes. Some of the mice were even embedded with data-transmitting radios.

But as I read further, the story began to lose some of its humorous aspects. Sometime during the 1950's, the brown tree snake was accidentally introduced to Guam, through cargo shipments. With no natural predators, the snakes rapidly multiplied and preyed on indigenous species, including exotic birds, that had no defenses against the invaders.

The snakes now cover vast tracks of the native jungle and routinely cause power outages, foul jet engines at Andersen Air Force Base, and cause millions of dollars in damage to electrical equipment. Also, the snakes are poisonous, putting at risk ground crews and pilots, whose cockpits must be painstakingly searched before takeoff.

Apparently, the snakes are extremely sensitive to the painkiller, and when they eat the mice, the drug quickly kills them. If this initial test proves successful, future operations are planned.

At that point, it was my intention to drop the story because it was a solution, however silly it might seem at first notion, to a very serious problem. But then I started reading some of the comments, and most were from veterans who had served at Andersen, and described in detail, just how serious a problem it was to the servicemen and women, and to the ecology of the island.

And that was when I decided that the story had merit. That it was a case in point of the danger of introducing non-native species into a biological system.

Tino Aguon, acting chief of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s wildlife resources office for Guam said, “Every time there is a technique that is tested and shows promise, we jump on that bandwagon.”