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Invasive computer mouse are devouringalbatrossesalive on a distant island in the Indian Ocean , so conservationists have come up with an explosive solvent — " bombing " the mouse .
shiner have been wreaking havoc on Marion Island , between South Africa and Antarctica , for decades . man by chance introduced the mice in the 19th hundred , and the rodent have since evolve a taste for wandering albatrosses ( Diomedea exulans ) and other threatened seabirds .
A wandering albatross on South Georgia Island in Antarctica (not the island where mice eat albatrosses alive).
The Mouse - Free Marion Project , a collaboration between the South African political science and BirdLife South Africa , is trying to raise $ 29 million to leave out 660 tons ( 600 metric tons ) of rodenticide - interlace pellets onto the island in winter 2027,AFP news agencyreported on Saturday ( Aug. 24 ) .
The task plans to send a police squad of whirlybird to overlook the pellets . By hit in wintertime when the computer mouse are most athirst , the conservationists hope to eradicate the full mouse population of up to1 million individuals .
" We have to get rid of every last mouse,“Mark Anderson , chief executive officer of BirdLife South Africa , told AFP news agency . " If there was a virile and distaff remaining , they could breed and eventually get back to where we are now . "
Related : Adult albatross found eat at to destruction by mice on 3rd distant island
House mouse ( Mus musculus ) first arrived on Marion Island via seal ships . They start their sovereignty of terror by annihilate the island ’s invertebrates and feasting on seabird eggs . By 2003 , the mice wereeating seabird chick alive , and now , a decade later , the mice have figured out they can take on adults , too .
research worker discovered thecarcasses of eight adult wanderingalbatrosses in April 2023 . The wench had deep wound significative of mice attack on their elbows and probably drop dead of lower-ranking infection or starving . Since then , further theme of grownup seabird fatalities show that black eye attack are escalating .
" Mice just climb onto them and just slowly deplete them until they knuckle under , " Anderson state . " We are lose 100 of thousand of seabirds every year through the mouse . "
albatross are defenseless against mice because they did n’t evolve alongside terrestrial predators . They spend most of their lives at ocean , and nesting land site like Marion Island are so quarantined that mice and other non - nautical mammals could n’t touch them until human beings come along . Because the birds evolved to live in an environment where they did n’t encounter any terrene predators , they do n’t possess any mechanisms by which they might defend themselves .
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A premature attempt to command Marion Island ’s invasive mouse population with cats had awful consequences . Researchers took five computed axial tomography to the island ’s meteorological place in 1948 , but the progeny of these kat went feral and hunted seabirds as well as mouse .
The feral cats bred and spread across the island until they werekilling an estimated 455,000 birdsa twelvemonth in the seventies . investigator successfully decimate the cats in 1991 .
The rodenticide at the marrow of the raw eradication scheme , in contrast , shouldonly defeat micebecause it does n’t affect Marion Island ’s aboriginal invertebrates and the seabirds usually feed in at ocean .
