Rodents Injected With Acetaminophen May Help Control Invasive Snakes

Naval Station Guam is being used as an experimental area for an effort to control brown tree snakes on the island. The snakes are in invasive species in Guam, and they endanger some of the island's native animals.

Stars and Stripes reports that frozen mice injected with acetaminophen, a drug commonly found in pain relievers like Tylenol, are being dropped by helicopters into the jungle canopy. When the snakes eat the mice, they are expected to die.

“The discovery that snakes will die when they eat acetaminophen was a huge step forward,” Anne Brooke, conservation resources program manager for Naval Facilities Command Marianas, said Thursday. “The problem was how you get the snakes to eat it.”

The mice are attached to cardboard squares and green streamers so that they will catch in the tree canopy where the snakes live.

The snakes arrived on the island in the 1980's in military cargo, the paper reports. The USDA and EPA have been studying how to control the snakes on Guam for ten years, as they try to assure that they don't spread to other islands like Hawaii. They finally found that the common pain reliever, even in small doses, was more than the snakes could tolerate.

The first experiment is being conducted on about 20 acres of the naval base, and if that works, the USDA will expand the effort to nearly 250 acres on Andersen Air Base through a grant from the Department of Defense that runs through 2011.

FMI www.navy.mil, www.usda.gov