Squeaky Death from Above
Let's Keep Killing Tree Snakes
One of the many cuts the DOGE dozers have made in DC involves snakes.
No, not Congress, but actual snakes – the brown tree snake to be specific.
While DOGE is doing amazing work they are, by necessity and one presumes by design, using chainsaws to cut when – on a few very rare occasions – a scalpel is needed.
Or maybe a Tylenol.
If that makes little sense now, it will shortly.
The brown tree snake is an invasive and devastating creature that – after it got into plane wheel wells and cargo containers during World War II – made its way from its native habitat of northern Australia and Papua New Guinea (where it actually has predators to keep it in check) to other Pacific islands that have no such defense.
Hawaii, Okinawa, and countless other islands were invaded by the snake, but no island has suffered more than Guam.
Since it literally landed on the island, it has driven at least a dozen native bird species to extinction, caused countless power outages (it’s in the name – tree snakes climb,) and bitten more than a few – well, really tens of thousands – of people.
Note – the snake is venomous but only slightly; adults can easily survive a bite, but small children have a much nastier reaction – people have died.
After years of testing and trying every other solution they could think of, vector control scientists finally figured out how to kill the snakes – acetaminophen.
Turns out that giving a snake Tylenol is like handing a human three shot glasses full of liquified strychnine – they dead.
So the question became how does one get a snake to take a Tylenol?
The solution was truly inspired – kill a bunch of mice, stuff them with 80 milligram pills, and drop them from helicopters into the tree canopy where the snakes are and hope they eat them.
And this was in 2010, well before DoorDash.
It actually worked, but not quite as well as hoped as too many of the mice tended to – rather float gently into the trees – plummet to the earth where the snakes spend less time.
But vector people are nothing if not resourceful; I know this because of my work with my local vector control district - which also happened to be the headquarters of the international Society of Vector Ecologists - as a board member.
A solution was eventually found to the problem and in 2013 – and ever since – the Tylenol-filled mice are kept as warm as possible to attract the snakes and stapled to a piece of light cardboard before they are dropped.
The cardboard acts as a bit of windscreen so instead of falling directly to the ground they tend to float in a leafy/whirligig and settle nicely in the treetops.
As silly as dropping acetaminophen-filled mice stapled to pieces of cardboard sounds, it actually works.
And while much of the DOGE cuts in this area – the USDA’s biosecurity office – are really about office space leasing and such, there is a possibility the cuts could bleed over into the actual work being done and that would be problematic.
One hopes this tiny glitch will be figured out soon and the mice can start falling from the skies again.
Squeaky death from above!
Obviously, the whole issue of animals plummeting to earth cannot go without a reference to one of the funniest moments in television history – WKRP in Cincinnati’s Thanksgiving promotion.
So here you go: