Kill one unwanted species and another arises

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More than 100 island-based animals have been exterminated or imperilled by rats. But the effects of the rodent interlopers on the local flora are less well investigated

of conservationists’ concerns, animals often seem to trump plants. For example, feral rats that live on islands after having been introduced accidentally by passing ships are excoriated because of the damage they do to local wildlife. More than 100 island-based animals have been exterminated or are imperilled by these rodents—birds being at particular risk through loss of eggs and nestlings. The effects of the interlopers on the local flora are, however, less well investigated.

Palmyra, an American territory, is the northernmost of the Line Islands. At the moment it has no permanent human residents. But it does host a scientific base that is home, at any given time, to a couple of dozen researchers. During the second world war, however, it was the site of a naval airbase—and along with the ships, planes and personnel that serviced this base came rats.

In 2007 she and her colleagues established seven vegetation-monitoring plots on the atoll, each 300 square metres in area. They observed the plants in these plots until the moment, four years later, when doom for Palmyra’s rats rained down from the skies in the form of bait stations loaded with poison. That this bombardment did for the rats successfully was confirmed the following year, by the setting up of further bait stations. Not a single station was touched. The animals were gone.

 

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