12 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 42.5 ms ] thread
This is excellent. I would have preferred a title like "US Navy drops frozen, dead mice in Guam to feed Tylenol to snakes."
"Cardboard wings and green party streams" were attached to the mice. Classy.

Here's hoping that The Big Picture has a feature on the sky-party-drug-raver-mice-bait.

My hometown of Fort Collins, CO came up with that brilliant idea. GO TEAM!
What could possibly go wrong? These sort of eradication measures always seem to create more problems than they solve.
The rub is that apparently the presence of this snake is a result of a human slipup to begin with. Maybe it's just an attempt to clean up after yourself, or maybe it's an attempt to stuff the genie back in the bottle. I feel like it would take a non-trivial depth of understanding to know which way this situation leans.
Don't worry. If something goes wrong, we've still got tons of other animals and pharmaceuticals we can air-drop.
It would be really interesting on an evolutionary level (though obviously detrimental to Guam's ecosystem) if this resulted in the snake population developing immunity to acetaminophen.
"The solution was to drop the mice into the snakes’ natural habitat, the branches of trees in the jungles of Guam. By outfitting the mice with cardboard wings and green party streams, the bait could float down to the jungle and catch on the branches. The result is a hanging, deadly snack for the snakes."

Who says good solutions can't be both low tech and hilarious?