The rodents are believed to have arrived on the four-square-mile island as stowaways on boats a few years ago but have now multiplied. Authorities are planning to use aircraft to bombard the island with poison pellets in a bid to tackle the infestation. The plan is to drop around 26 tonnes of pellets on the island at the end of this month.
Biologists estimate that there is one rat for every square yard of the island and say they pose a grave threat to the ecology of the nature reserve, which is part of a scattered archipelago of islands off Tuscany. Some conservationists are worried, however, that the pellets could accidentally land in the sea, killing fish and other marine life.
But the authorities have dismissed those concerns. "No one wants to poison the island," Franca Zanichelli, the director of the national park authority, said. "The project will be managed by experts. The poison pellets are similar to those used everywhere to kill rats." The pellets will have to be dropped from the air because the island is too rugged for them to be distributed by land.
4 comments:
Poison may work, but what if they were to just introduce foxes, owls and eagles (etc) and just let nature take its course?
If they're worried about too many of these, only make one (or none) of the males fertile...
Um, I have to wonder how the rats survive, if there is one rat per square yard (I guess thats like a square metre) what the heck are they eating ? Nature tends to have things balance out quite quickly.
Steve: Foxes, Owls and Eagles are just as virulent to local fauna - see Australia. Also; there are so many rats now that the predators would become prey within a week. Rats are intelligent and dangerous in numbers.
William: rats are very nearly exempt from that rule; they will eat anything and everything, including one another, and rats breed -fast-.
Nature can't sort these animals out; they are far too successful as an invasive species.
Is there no other wildlife on the island? The poison would effect that wildlife too, there is no poison that only kills rats.
Also it worries me that they are talking about dropping the poison from planes. IME poisons need to be carefully located and covered to minimise the likelihood of it getting into the water table.
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