Paradise Lost: Eden’s War with a Serpent Army

By Phu Ho

            Guam is a 250 square miles island in the Pacific Ocean, the largest island among the more than 2,000 islands in the region of Micronesia.  This island is about 1,500 miles east of the Philippines, 1,500 miles south of Japan, and 3,800 miles west of Hawaii or to be precise, Guam is located at 13.444304 latitude and 144.793732 longitudes on the world’s map.  From an aerial view, Guam’s shape looks like a soaked sock floating in a washing machine.  This tropical island paradise has a reasonably warm and humid climate, which is more comfortable during December to April due to trade winds.  In addition, Guam has beautiful seascapes with coastal fringing reefs and various topographies.  People can see the magnificent view of the tropical, warm ocean with its countless blue-aqua-green waves from the coastal plains or heights above the coasts. These scenic attractions bring in more than one million tourists annually to Guam.  The natives’ culture adds to Guam’s Garden of Eden paradise setting.  The Chamorro people are the natives of Guam.  They are known for their latte stone houses, which are houses elevated by two-pieces stone pillars curved from coral blocks set in two parallel rows of 4 to 6 stones, which can weight up to 60,000 pounds.  These people customs are that of sharing. They share food, material items, and labor when needed. These customs strengthen kinship and friendship. In the past, Guam’s paradise forests had many colorful, tropical singing birds and people weren’t bothered by flies and mosquitoes, because the island didn’t had any until Spaniards introduced them in the 1600’s.  This Eden island ecosystem did face difficulties.

            Guam faces annual typhoons and in World War II, Japan and the U.S. fought for the island and some forests got leveled by naval artillery fire. However, the island’s wildlife recovered from the typhoons and the war.  After the U.S. regained Guam in 1944, the war was over for the people of Guam, but another war and catastrophe for the island’s ecosystem has just begun. By 1948, up to 42% of Guam’s land was used for military bases.  There were busy streams of supplies coming from Papua New Guinea.  A popular story has it; a pregnant female brown tree snake infiltrated a plane from New Guinea to Guam.  Although, it was more likely that many brown tree snakes came over to Guam from hiding in derelict vehicles and equipment that were dumped in New Guinea during World War II.  This snake in the Garden of Eden paradise scenario will not end well for Guam.

            The brown tree snake is a mildly venomous snake, but never the less venomous. An adult brown tree snake can grow to be between 3 feet and 9 feet. According to Oxford Journals of science, being at 9 feet, a brown tree snake can harm or kill chicken, puppies, and small children.  Unlike other snakes, the brown tree snake is willing to consume carrion and organic material. It has been recorded that this snake have eaten dog food, chicken bones, raw hamburger meat, maggot-infested carrions, paper towels, ribs, betel nuts, dog placentas, and used feminine hygiene products. The females of this snake specie can store sperm in her for years, making them ideal colonizers. Also, these snakes are nocturnal and arboreal, meaning that they’re active at night and lives in trees. Like a spy, the brown tree snake has successfully infiltrated Guam.  It is using the cover of night to move about and armed with a chemical weapon, it’s venom; these serpents are ready to declare war on paradise.

            On Guam the brown tree snake had no competition or predators, so the tree snake population grew exponentially. The birds of Guam never dealt with a predator and didn’t know how to deal with this snake.  The tree snake feed on everything on the island.  The juvenile snakes feed on lizards, while adults feed on birds, bats, and rodents.  By the 1960’s wildlife authorities noticed that a third of southern Guam was absent of birds, and by the late 1970’s two-thirds of southern Guam had no birds.  At first, it was thought that the birds were killed off by pesticides and diseases brought by mosquitoes.  No one knew that the brown tree snakes caused the birds’ disappearances, because the snakes were hard to detect due to them being nocturnal and arboreal.

            Fast forward to present day time. Like good soldiers and killing machines, the brown tree snakes have caused the extinction of 10 of 12 Guam’s bird species and 2 of 3 bat species. These snakes also decimated the island’s populations of lizards, small rodents, and some domestic animals.  Due to the loss of many birds and bats, cascading effects have developed. Without the birds and bats to pollenate plants and spread seeds; the recruitment of those plants have decreased.  In addition, since there are no birds preying on spiders, the spider populations has exploded in numbers. At present, the human population on Guam is about 200,000.  The brown tree snake army is over 2 million, out numbering people 10 to 1.  The scenario seems to be right out of a science fiction horror movie.  Guam is a real bad place to be if you have a fear of spiders or poisonous snakes.

            The serpent army has started invading human dwellings to attack and terrorize people.  The brown tree snakes caused black power outages by crawling on powerlines so often; the local people call them “brown outs.”  There is even a story of an eight feet long tree snake crawling out of a toilet and into a child’s crib and biting the child. There are many cases where the brown tree snakes crawl into people’s homes and target small children sleeping between adults or their older siblings and biting them multiple times. People are fighting back with various tactics.

            At first, the military deployed trained dogs to sniff out snakes and their handlers armed with a stick for killing the brown tree snakes.  Then modified crawfish traps were deployed with live mice as baits. The mice weren’t harm, since they were in compartments that cannot be reached by the brown tree snakes.  At one time, people used feral pigs and cats in hope that they would eat the snakes.  That was a bad tactic, since pigs and cats are among the worse invasive species to introduce into fragile habits like islands. These animals feed on the same preys that the snakes eat.  Worst, is that pigs also feed on plants and create mud wallows that would destroy Guam habitats. Don’t worry; the United States government has decided to send paratroops reinforcement to battle the brown tree snakes. In 2013, BBC news reported that U.S. gave $8 million dollars a year to fund a project that parachutes 2,000 dead mice per day stuffed with Tylenol, which is a poison to brown tree snakes onto Guam’s trees via helicopters in order to curb the snake population.  Although, this idea was claimed to be very effective, the plan isn’t aggressive enough to significantly curb a population of 2 million snakes. Some areas on Guam have up to 13,000 snakes per square miles. It would take almost 3 years to kill 2 million tree snakes this way, given that they don’t reproduce at all.  Now, if 200,000 mice were parachute per day, then there would be hope. But the smallest clutch of 3 eggs from the current snake population per year would create 3 million new snakes.  People need to be more aggressive in their efforts in fighting the brown tree snake, otherwise paradise will be lost.

           

Works Cited

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Haldre Rogers et al.  “Effects of an invasive predator cascade to plants via mutualism disruption.” Nature Communications volume 8, Article number: 14557 (2017). http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14557  Accessed 13 February 2018. Web.

Jerick Sablan. “More funding to eliminate brown tree snakes.” USA Today: Pacific Daily News. Aug. 26, 2015.  http://www.guampdn.com/story/news/2015/08/25/more-funding-eliminate-brown-tree-snakes-0826/32037271/  Accessed 13 February 2018. Web.                     

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“Invasion Of The Tree Snakes And Other Coming In.” Newsweek. July 27, 1997. http://www.newsweek.com/invasion-tree-snakes-and-other-coming-174366  Accessed 29 March 2018. Web.

Thomas Hall. “Operational Control of Brown Tree Snake on Guam.” Vertebrate Pest Conference Proceedings, 1996. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.bing.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1022&context=vpc17  Accessed 29 March 2018. Web.

Larry Clark et al. “Efficacy, effort, and cost comparisons of trapping and acetaminophen-baiting for control of brown tree snakes on Guam.” Human–Wildlife Interactions 6(2):222–236, Fall 2012.  http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/nwrc/publications/12pubs/clark122.pdf  Accessed 20 March 2018. Web.