A purported sighting of a rat wouldn’t get much attention in many places, but it caused a stir earlier this year on Alaska's St. Paul Island.
The search was likened to trying to find a needle in a haystack “and not knowing if a needle even exists.”📺 24/7 Chicago news stream: Watch NBC 5 free wherever you are
“We know — because we’ve seen this on other islands and in other locations in Alaska and across the world — that rats absolutely decimate seabird colonies, so the threat is never one that the community would take lightly,” said Lauren Divine, director of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island’s ecosystem conservation office.The anxiety on St.
They also have asked residents to be on the lookout for any rodents and are seeking permission to have the U.S. Department of Agriculture bring a dog to the island to sniff out any rats. Canines are otherwise banned from the Pribilofs to protect fur seals. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is planning an environmental review to analyze eradicating the potentially tens of thousands of rats on four uninhabited islands in the far-flung, volcano-pocked Aleutian chain, hundreds of miles southwest of St. Paul. More than 10 million seabirds of varying species nest in the Aleutians.
The success of what was long called Rat Island, a tract in the Aleutians roughly half the size of Manhattan, shows how effective eradication programs can be. Rats are believed to have first arrived with a Japanese shipwreck in the late 18th century. Fur traders introduced arctic foxes there the following century.
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