The Scourge Is Scrubbed
Scientists Celebrate More Than 10 Years of a Rat-Free Anacapa Island
This newspaper thought it had problems when a single rat scuttled under an editor’s desk last week. But the 15 minutes of shrieking, jumping on chairs, and eventual capture came nowhere close to the challenge faced by scientists and park rangers when they undertook the ambitious and delicate effort to permanently rid Anacapa Island of invasive black rats. Since the early 1900s, the rats had decimated rare seabird populations and wreaked general biological havoc on the 700-acre swath of rugged but life-rich volcanic rock 11 miles off the coast.
The project — which started with four years of research before a helicopter sprinkled custom-made poison pellets over the terrain in 2001 — was the first of its kind in North America, but it has become a model for similar efforts around the world to take troubled island habitats back to their state before human-brought nonnative wildlife attacked their shores. Half of the species extinctions around the world are caused by out-of-control rat populations, and 80 percent of all extinctions occur on islands, often home to unique flora and fauna that evolved in a cocoon of natural selection away from the mainland.
There was no shortage of critics when the National Park Service and the Santa Cruz–based Island Conservation group first pitched the $3 million “death from above” plan. (The money came from a settlement in the 1990 oil spill off Huntington Beach.) Naysayers ranged from animal activists who pointed to the sanctity of all life and worried about collateral damage to other creatures to a man named Rod Puddicombe, who made an illegal and vain attempt to save the rats by tossing vitamins on the island, to blistering editorials in the Santa Barbara News-Press to the Environmental Protection Agency, which at first threatened to throw a lead scientist in jail.
