Sat, Oct 02, 2010
Rodents Injected With Acetaminophen May Help Control Invasive
Snakes
Naval Station Guam is being used as an experimental area for an
effort to control brown tree snakes on the island. The snakes are
in invasive species in Guam, and they endanger some of the island's
native animals.
Stars and Stripes reports that frozen mice injected
with acetaminophen, a drug commonly found in pain relievers like
Tylenol, are being dropped by helicopters into the jungle canopy.
When the snakes eat the mice, they are expected to die.
“The discovery that snakes will die when they eat
acetaminophen was a huge step forward,” Anne Brooke,
conservation resources program manager for Naval Facilities Command
Marianas, said Thursday. “The problem was how you get the
snakes to eat it.”
The mice are attached to cardboard squares and green streamers
so that they will catch in the tree canopy where the snakes
live.
The snakes arrived on the island in the 1980's in military
cargo, the paper reports. The USDA and EPA have been studying how
to control the snakes on Guam for ten years, as they try to assure
that they don't spread to other islands like Hawaii. They finally
found that the common pain reliever, even in small doses, was more
than the snakes could tolerate.
The first experiment is being conducted on about 20 acres of the
naval base, and if that works, the USDA will expand the effort to
nearly 250 acres on Andersen Air Base through a grant from the
Department of Defense that runs through 2011.
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