Operation Mickey: Eradicating Snakes on Guam

The military is dropping thousands of dead mice on Guam. The dead mice have tylenol pills shoved down their dead throats, or maybe up their asses. If tree snakes, which is an invasive, prolific species on Guam, eat the mice, they die. Oh, and your tax dollars are paying for the military to roofie dead mice to kill snakes.

From NBC here:

They floated down from the sky Sunday — 2,000 mice, wafting on tiny cardboard parachutes over Andersen Air Force Base in the U.S. territory of Guam.

But the rodent commandos didn’t know they were on a mission: to help eradicate the brown tree snake, an invasive species that has caused millions of dollars in wildlife and commercial losses since it arrived a few decades ago.
That’s because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.

The unlikely invasion was the fourth and biggest rodent air assault so far, part of an $8 million U.S. program approved in February to eradicate the snakes and save the exotic native birds that are their snack food.

The U.S. has tried lots of ways to eliminate the snakes, which it says likely arrived in an inadequately inspected cargo shipment sometime in the 1950s.

But brown tree snakes have an Achilles’ heel: Tylenol.

Brown tree snakes also love mice. It’s easy to bait mice with acetaminophen, but how do you then deliver the mice to the snakes?

Guam is home to an estimated 2 million of the reptiles, which in some areas reach a density of 13,000 per square mile.

Wildlife workers do have a way to chart how well the mice work. In addition to the acetaminophen and the parachutes, some of the poison pests also come equipped with tiny data-transmitting radios.

Okay, I get that an invasive species is wrecking the island. And, killing the snakes with roofied rodents sounds like it might work. But lets do the math. There were 4 airdrops of mice, with this one being the largest. The latest was 2,000 mice. Lets say at this point, there were 6000 mice dropped in total. The cost so far is 8 million bucks. As of now, that is 1,300 bucks per roofied rat. The best projection of killer mice would have left 6000 snakes dead. There are 2 MILLION snakes.

According to my calculations, it will cost 2,658,002,000 to kill every snake. Even Obamacare won’t cost that much. Just nuke Guam from orbit. Its cheaper, and the only way to be sure.