EnviroLink Forum

There is a plan to poison the rats on the Galapagos islands. This is fine if they were just killing an invasive species (and in this case there are black rats and house mice that have invaded) but there were native rodents living on the island and like the other wildlife of the islands, have some unique features from an isolated population on an island. I am guessing that their removal of some of the wildlife species for a later return (in January) might include some native rodents but there is no indication of that in the news reports. Here is a link to someone's efforts to study the effects of the invasive rodents on the native rodents:

I appreciate your point and hope they will give any native rodents at risk some thought. However, unless the rats are killed, the world will lose the giant tortoises that are so linked to the Galapagos since they occur here as one of the only two species of giant tortoise still occurring in the wild (the Aldabra tortoise of the Seychelles is the other, with other species still living in captivity, but very rare). I like to think that with the non-native rats being such invasive animals, you could bait them in places where native species may not occur or fear to go. And perhaps you could even capture native animals that could then easily breed up and be released when the invaders have been eliminated. But not to go for the rats, even with risk to native species, with the world full of rodent species but only a few giant tortoises, my vote goes to the tortoise (also thinking of the unique bird species of the Galapagos that probably suffer from rats).