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Mouse Bombs to the Rescue

Guam seems like a creepy place. Back in 2010, I wrote about how the island had become infested with hordes of brown tree snakes that cause millions of dollars in property damage and frequent power outages every year. On top of that, the snakes have wiped out most of the native bird population and, in doing so, have allowed the spider population to thrive to the point that Guam now has 40 times more spiders than any neighboring Pacific island. Tourism has obviously suffered because, well, snakes and spiders are everywhere. It’s basically nightmare fuel.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a plan though. This spring they plan to drop a bunch of dead mice from helicopters into the jungles in Guam’s Andersen Air Force base. The mice will be laced with acetaminophen, which is deadly to the snakes, and attached to cardboard and streamers so they can float down into the jungle canopy where the snakes live and deliver a last meal right to their doorstep. They did a smaller mouse bomb drop over the naval base in 2010 and evidently it was successful enough to try again in the larger, 110-acre area. It sounds crazy but, hey, anything that works.

And if nothing else, you have to give them points for creative risk management.