Guam has brown tree snake problems. Alien, secretive, and
extremely hungry, the reptiles snuck onto Guam as unintentional
cargo on docking ships decades ago, possibly as early as the
1940s. And now snakes bite sleeping babies, cripple electrical
grids by slithering into conductors, and wreak ecological havoc.
Although most island residents never encounter the nocturnal
tree-dwelling snakes, they’ve have had a particularly woeful
impact on Guam’s native bird, lizard, and flying-mammal species.
The Micronesian kingfisher now exists only in captivity, and the
Guam flycatcher is extinct. Only one of Guam’s three native bat
species has been sighted since 1968, and endemic lizards have
been decimated. Birds are critical for dispersing and digesting
seeds, says Haldre Rogers, an ecologist at Rice University in
Houston who studies the impact of bird loss on Guam. Rogers’s
research has shown that seeds on Guam fall to the ground rather
than being carried through the forest by birds, which means the
forest may be shift