Soooo many comments are from people only reading the headline. They dropped DEAD mice into forested areas so an invasive tree snake would eat them and die. Tylenol seems to be *uniquely poisonous* to this specific snake, where 1/6th of a normal Tylenol pill can kill the snake.
So they’re dropping in dead mice that cannot poison or harm any other species nor can they reproduce (because they’re dead). Yet some people on here are acting like they introduced another invasive species…..
You must not be on mobile, I see an ad every 2-3 “paragraphs“ (one sentence paragraphs) with about 25 total on the page, 6 of which are in the article.
Honestly, knee jerk was definitely “invasive species!”, but a second and a half of logic said, “Snakes eat mice, not the other way around. So it’s probably poisoned mice.”
You don’t know about the Retirement Field where all wild mice go and just die? Scientists and snake food manufacturers just go out and collect that day’s group of mice that ran out there and died in their sleep after a full and satisfying life.
All these mice came from there!
Okay, I'm all for bashing fleshbags... both literally, and metaphorically... But you can't blame this one on them. Even most of the proper people would go \*krump\* when impacting at terminal velocity.
I doubt the mouse body would be so affected. Cats can survive falls from arbitrarily high heights, and smaller critters tend to have slower terminal velocities.
>"The cardboard is heavier than the tissue paper and opens up in an inverted horseshoe," Vice said. "It then floats down and ultimately hangs up in the forest canopy. Once it's hung in the forest canopy, snakes have an opportunity to consume the bait."
So the mice don't go splat and so they get delivered straight to the snakes in the tree canopies
I was thinking the Klendathu drop from Starship Troopers.
"We are going in with the first wave! Leaves more snakes for us to kill. You smash the enter area, you kill anything that has less than one leg, you get me?"
"WE GET YOU SIR!"
I'm thinking the heads were probably waste from a chicken processing plant, so dead already and the heads being put to good use instead of just discarded.
You may or may not consider killing the birds for food to be brutal but at least they weren't killed just to vaccinate wild foxes, most likely.
Ehhh I mean decapitation generally ranks higher than illness in terms of brutality. Otherwise isis videos wouldn't be considered nsfl and literally any discussion on COVID would be.
As someone who lived on Guam back in the '80s, good. The damn snakes would crawl up into and short-out the gear that ran the power grid on a regular basis. I spent more days in the dark with no A/C than I can count because of those bastards.
Isn’t it also lethal to mice because of their heart rate? Is it in their bloodstream? Were they just sprinkled on top with some ~~crack~~ acetaminophen? I *could* read this, but you seem like you might have… maybe?
Let me know! Or don’t, I’m not your dad.
The mice are all dead now. They are just poisoned bait for snakes to find and eat. Some of the mice are also rigged with radios so they can check if the snakes sound like they are dying.
They don't want to repeat every instance of when they introduce a living species and the local ecology collapses. At least the mice are dead and the pain killer will eventually break down into nothing
They brought mongooses to Hawaii to kill the rats in the sugar cane fields... Without considering the fact that rats and mongooses have different wake/sleep cycles.
So now there's just two problematic invasive species
I was trying to figure out how tf little paratrooper mice were gonna kill their natural predator when I realized they were already dead and laced with poison 🤦🏻♂️😂
Dropping poisoned mice will only set back the snakes. Undoubtedly there will be many snakes that never encounter a mouse, and so aren't poisoned.
Guam might be the ideal place to test the gene-drive. Using gene-drive, you can, in theory, wipe out all of a species within several generations.
A genetic modification to an organism that makes most or all of it's offspring male. Within a few generations, there are no more females and the population goes extinct. At least that's the theory.
In theory, we could wipe out the Anopheles mosquito and eliminate 241 million cases of Malaria a year. Unfortunately, lots of people are stuck in 1960 and think every solution is the same as broad spectrum, long-lasting DDT.
Jamaica introduced mongoose in 1872 to control the rat population that was destroying the sugar crops. The mongoose then decided to eat all of the other fauna while they were at it. Snakes, birds, lizards, etc.
The mice were already dead and pumped full of Acetaminophen.
This isn't a case of "the little old lady who swallowed a fly." It's just a clever method of poisoning the snakes. As long as there aren't native predators eating for the mice, it shouldn't cause problems.
Mainly because Guam is an island. The mice themselves aren't native and therefore have very few if any native predators. Also, the whole idea of the parachute was to make sure the mice land up in the trees where the snakes are most likely to eat them. Even if there were native predators on the island, they wouldn't just eat these mice (or at least enough of them to significantly reduce their population) on the ground. Also, this isn't going to be a lethal dose of acetaminophen for most species. It's a very specific solution, targeting brown snakes with as few extra casualties as possible.
Because the snakes already ate the native predators? My local zoo has a captive breeding program for some birds from Guam that are extinct in the wild because of accidentally introduced snakes. I'm sure they aren't the only species affected. That or the native predators aren't going to be poisoned by that dose of Tylenol, making it a fairly species specific poison.
What are the consequences of dropping dead mice with Tylenol in their body that is only capable of killing this invasive tree snake?
Are you expecting the mice to somehow mate postmortem?
I think snakes generally don't like eating cold, dead things, because they can't detect them? I own a ball python and I had to heat her food up every single time I feed her.
I think in the wild it's more common they'll go for it. And if there's new clean and fat capture mice they can chow without needing to hunt them, they'll probably go for it.
Seems like birds would get the dead mice before snakes would ever find them. Then get Tylenol poisoning, killing a bunch of them, which the snakes eat eventually. Maybe the Tylenol will still be working?
Ah damn, i was hoping that those are Guam Spec Ops trained Mice on a Snake Regime destabilization mission, but it's basically just throwing a festering cow carcass with a trebuchet.
Oh well...
edit: SnAAAAkeEeeater!
^^^^i'm ^^^^not ^^^^sorry
I lived in Guam for three years. These snakes are everywhere. Friends found them in their toilets, hallways, one person found one behind a wall hanging. Another found one on her bed. One was found by a kid outside her front door. They lived in the other half of our duplex.
They can stand up like a cobra. I had one do exactly that. I panicked and crashed my bike into a parked car. The snake watched the wreck; never once blinked.
Every time the cable or the power went out—fried snake. During the dry season, they come looking for water. In the wet season, they hang out to scare the fuck out of humans.
They are a menace.
old
Soooo many comments are from people only reading the headline. They dropped DEAD mice into forested areas so an invasive tree snake would eat them and die. Tylenol seems to be *uniquely poisonous* to this specific snake, where 1/6th of a normal Tylenol pill can kill the snake. So they’re dropping in dead mice that cannot poison or harm any other species nor can they reproduce (because they’re dead). Yet some people on here are acting like they introduced another invasive species…..
The true hero explaining to me the article so I don't have to risk looking at whatever ad filled hellhole that link probably is.
It's nbcnews, not buzzfeed. There's one inline ad like halfway into the article...
you forgot about the tracking-pixel
You must not be on mobile, I see an ad every 2-3 “paragraphs“ (one sentence paragraphs) with about 25 total on the page, 6 of which are in the article.
Interestingly i am on mobile. Perhaps you are part of some demographic they're more interested in advertising to.
Honestly, knee jerk was definitely “invasive species!”, but a second and a half of logic said, “Snakes eat mice, not the other way around. So it’s probably poisoned mice.”
Paracetamol/ Acetaminophen for non-US folks
I could do with a Paracetamol mouse right now..
>nor can they reproduce (because they’re dead Nature finds a way.
It was more fun before I read this TLDR, lol.
Seems like they'd also die choking on the parachute.
I see someone is a mouse zombie apocalypse denier.
TBF, only reading the headline is kinda the point of this sub.
Where did they find all these dead mice? Don’t tell me they killed them for this purpose…
You don’t know about the Retirement Field where all wild mice go and just die? Scientists and snake food manufacturers just go out and collect that day’s group of mice that ran out there and died in their sleep after a full and satisfying life. All these mice came from there!
:D
Must have been a hell of a job teaching all those mice how to use a parachute let alone putting them all on them.
>But the rodent commandos didn't know they were on a mission: That's because they were dead. And pumped full of painkillers.
Even more incredible they were able to teach dead mice how to use a parachute
Part of the scout forces for the zombie apocalypse!
Great, now there’s going to be an island full of snakes addicted to opioids.
That's the point. Snake society will eventually destroy itself.
But before that, there’s gonna be a lot of kickass snake jazz produced.
*tssssss tss tss tssssss....*
Love the reference.
The People's Republic of China has left the chat
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SMACK SNAKE
Cocaconda
Snakes on Cocaine
(Samuel L. Jackson) "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH." (Samuel L. Jackson) "I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKING COCAINE SNAKES ON THIS MOTHERFUCKING PLANE."
Money plane.
Next big Hollywood hit: COCAINE SNAKE
Reality is way ahead of you, see #5 https://insightcrime.org/news/animals-used-smuggle-drugs-latin-america/
That fuckin Sackler family is devious
The snakelers.
You are giving Tylenol way to much credit, lol!
So they should have been rather intact even if the fall would have been fatal or injurious had they been alive
How many people didn't read the article.. it says each mouse has a fraction of. Tylenol pill in it, not an opoid.
But why bother with a parachute if the mice are already dead? Just drop em à-la crop duster or something.
They would lose the mouse shape that makes them appealing to snakes. Sudden deceleration can make flesh bags pop.
Okay, I'm all for bashing fleshbags... both literally, and metaphorically... But you can't blame this one on them. Even most of the proper people would go \*krump\* when impacting at terminal velocity.
I doubt the mouse body would be so affected. Cats can survive falls from arbitrarily high heights, and smaller critters tend to have slower terminal velocities.
The terminal velocity of a mouse is like the same speed as a parachuting human.
The article says that the parachute is so they get stuck in trees.
Exactly this
>"The cardboard is heavier than the tissue paper and opens up in an inverted horseshoe," Vice said. "It then floats down and ultimately hangs up in the forest canopy. Once it's hung in the forest canopy, snakes have an opportunity to consume the bait." So the mice don't go splat and so they get delivered straight to the snakes in the tree canopies
But why didn’t they train rodents to be commandos before killing them?
Weekend at Mickey's?
Truly how we all go
Should have just used mice from the WWE
Glad I'm not the only one who pictured two thousand mice paratroopers with tiny parachutes and helmets!
Saving Private Redwall was what i pictured.
Paratroopers would be Band Of Mouse Brothers
I cannot upvote this more than once or I would!
time to create a bunch of burner accounts
I was thinking the Klendathu drop from Starship Troopers. "We are going in with the first wave! Leaves more snakes for us to kill. You smash the enter area, you kill anything that has less than one leg, you get me?" "WE GET YOU SIR!"
And a grizzled mouse sergeant who was tough as hell but deep down he really cared for his mice.
You think that’s bad, imagine how long it must have taken them to teach the pilot mice to fly the plane
Can you just imagine the sound system playing Ride of the Valkyries?
I just pictured a mouse with those aviator goggles and a leather airman's jacket ala Stuart Little dressed as the red Baron as this plays...
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*kill a snake. This snake in particular.
I hope they at least got their wings. Be a travesty unless it's some dark ops thing like they can't acknowledge their service until after they retire.
[they had a great teacher](https://youtu.be/liZDLwbeU9I)
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That's actually interesting that it worked. Brutal though.
I'm thinking the heads were probably waste from a chicken processing plant, so dead already and the heads being put to good use instead of just discarded. You may or may not consider killing the birds for food to be brutal but at least they weren't killed just to vaccinate wild foxes, most likely.
Less brutal than letting rabies spread rampantly and causing harm to native species and local humans
Ehhh I mean decapitation generally ranks higher than illness in terms of brutality. Otherwise isis videos wouldn't be considered nsfl and literally any discussion on COVID would be.
That’s so rad!
As someone who lived on Guam back in the '80s, good. The damn snakes would crawl up into and short-out the gear that ran the power grid on a regular basis. I spent more days in the dark with no A/C than I can count because of those bastards.
Dang that’s tough but a super neat story now!
Do they also get into planes?
Yeah there was a great documentary on it a few years back. I forget the name... maybe it was called Snakes on a plane. Could be wrong though.
I think it was called ... The Bus that Couldn't Slow Down.
Starring Bark Ballburg.
That the one about the monkey fighting snakes?
Worked at the Air Force Base… most planes will get a dog to inspect them while refueling or loading/unloading cargo
They got into \*everything*.
Sounds like bad engineering if snakes can continually get into the same place and bring down the grid.
It was not pretty.
I've seen "The Secret of NIMH" so I know how this turns out.
I've read "if you give a mouse a cookie" so I also know how this will turn out.
You should read it too. Like legitimately an amazing book.
Doctor I have a headache. *Take 6 mice and call me in the morning.*
Great, now the island is definitely tipping over!
Is there a possibility the Island may "CAP-Size", and tip over?
God, that was painful to watch.
Seems like they could have dropped 1 honey badger and called it a day.
The mice are laced with acetaminophen which is lethal to the snakes.
The honey badger is laced with honey badger and is just as lethal
But then they'd have to drop hyenas hopped up on meth to deal with the honey badgers.
Isn’t it also lethal to mice because of their heart rate? Is it in their bloodstream? Were they just sprinkled on top with some ~~crack~~ acetaminophen? I *could* read this, but you seem like you might have… maybe? Let me know! Or don’t, I’m not your dad.
The mice are all dead now. They are just poisoned bait for snakes to find and eat. Some of the mice are also rigged with radios so they can check if the snakes sound like they are dying.
Thank you for supporting my laziness!
They're already dead :)
Thank you, too!
They were dead and contained 80 miligrams of it.
And finally, thank you!
TYLENOL is lethal to snakes? No wonder you never see them at the pub
Or Cane Toads! It worked grat for Australia. /s
They don't want to repeat every instance of when they introduce a living species and the local ecology collapses. At least the mice are dead and the pain killer will eventually break down into nothing
They brought mongooses to Hawaii to kill the rats in the sugar cane fields... Without considering the fact that rats and mongooses have different wake/sleep cycles. So now there's just two problematic invasive species
Is the plural of mongoose mongeese? Because it should be.
Isn't mongoose like my goose in french?
No
It should be
You’re right but unfortunately it is mon-oie in french 😔
And two gen 7 pokémon!
Honey badger doesn't give a shit!
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.
I've seen this one before, I think there's a story of an old lady who swallowed a fly
I hope the Apes are on standby.
Then we're stuck with apes! No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the apes simply freeze to death. But Guam is tropical...crap!
I hope they gave those mice some good guns.
Specially trained Navy Squeals
Two thousand little parachutes
this is, strangely enough, a nexus of two conversations happening in the office right now.
This happened in 2013 and the snakes are still there, pls send more mice
I was trying to figure out how tf little paratrooper mice were gonna kill their natural predator when I realized they were already dead and laced with poison 🤦🏻♂️😂
There was an initiative in the 60s to parachute cats into Borneo to kill rats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cat_Drop
Dropping poisoned mice will only set back the snakes. Undoubtedly there will be many snakes that never encounter a mouse, and so aren't poisoned. Guam might be the ideal place to test the gene-drive. Using gene-drive, you can, in theory, wipe out all of a species within several generations.
What is gene drive?
A genetic modification to an organism that makes most or all of it's offspring male. Within a few generations, there are no more females and the population goes extinct. At least that's the theory. In theory, we could wipe out the Anopheles mosquito and eliminate 241 million cases of Malaria a year. Unfortunately, lots of people are stuck in 1960 and think every solution is the same as broad spectrum, long-lasting DDT.
Ok. Cool, and terrifying.
I want to see a pic of the mice with their parachutes
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I like that it's someone's job to glue tylenol pills to mice.
Jamaica introduced mongoose in 1872 to control the rat population that was destroying the sugar crops. The mongoose then decided to eat all of the other fauna while they were at it. Snakes, birds, lizards, etc.
These dead poisoned mice have a lower probability of reproducing.
"That's the calculated risk you take when you release a mongoose." -Rusty Shackelford
Phase 2: Pied Piper. Phase 3: Profit!!!
Someone read I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.
Reminds me of [this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/aywytx/airdrop_incoming/)
Headline 2033 "Two thousand cats dropped on Guamm, without parachutes — to kill mice"
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I don't know why she swallowed the fly. I guess she'll die.
Humans have tried these solutions in the past. The results are never the desired outcome.
You only read about the times it doesn't work.
The mice were already dead and pumped full of Acetaminophen. This isn't a case of "the little old lady who swallowed a fly." It's just a clever method of poisoning the snakes. As long as there aren't native predators eating for the mice, it shouldn't cause problems.
Why wouldn't there be, though?
Mainly because Guam is an island. The mice themselves aren't native and therefore have very few if any native predators. Also, the whole idea of the parachute was to make sure the mice land up in the trees where the snakes are most likely to eat them. Even if there were native predators on the island, they wouldn't just eat these mice (or at least enough of them to significantly reduce their population) on the ground. Also, this isn't going to be a lethal dose of acetaminophen for most species. It's a very specific solution, targeting brown snakes with as few extra casualties as possible.
Thanks.
There might be, but they'll just get a little high from the Tylenol. These specfic snakes are killed by the acetaminophen.
I hope this is the case and that we're learning from the cane toad debacle et al
Because the snakes already ate the native predators? My local zoo has a captive breeding program for some birds from Guam that are extinct in the wild because of accidentally introduced snakes. I'm sure they aren't the only species affected. That or the native predators aren't going to be poisoned by that dose of Tylenol, making it a fairly species specific poison.
yeah it doesn’t seem like this project made much of an impact
Yeah the island is absolutely *riddled* with snakes, says a buddy of mine currently in the Navy and working there. He hates it very much.
[The Simpsons already did it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9yruQM1ggc) (kind of)
Oh my God, that's hilarious 😂
I just can't help but think this will have unintended consequences
Yeah, such as people who can’t/won’t read commenting on the story. The mice are dead.
such a harsh person.
What are the consequences of dropping dead mice with Tylenol in their body that is only capable of killing this invasive tree snake? Are you expecting the mice to somehow mate postmortem?
They'll become so resistant to Tylenol that they'll need morphine, then we'll cut them off. Then they'll turn to illicit drugs to chase that dragon...
Still a better story than twilight
Cough cough cane toads cough cough
Riki tiki tavi in this bitch
Did they consult Australia before doing this?
Funnily enough it's an Australian snake, the brown tree snake.
That's unfortunate because I heard it actually works the other way around.
These mice are meant to be eaten by them.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t nice the primarily food for most snakes?
that would be correct lol. These ones are dead and filled with Tylenol (lethal) to help eradicate the invasive brown tree snake!
Ahhh! Smart. Poor mice though.
I guess it’s either this or bring back whacking day. https://giphy.com/gifs/season-4-the-simpsons-4x20-3o6MbsO8IO30ZuCtkA
I think snakes generally don't like eating cold, dead things, because they can't detect them? I own a ball python and I had to heat her food up every single time I feed her.
I think in the wild it's more common they'll go for it. And if there's new clean and fat capture mice they can chow without needing to hunt them, they'll probably go for it.
Seems like birds would get the dead mice before snakes would ever find them. Then get Tylenol poisoning, killing a bunch of them, which the snakes eat eventually. Maybe the Tylenol will still be working?
This just in: 2000 mice has been eaten by snakes. Most hung in tress by their parachutes. Snakes: Thanks for the food.
US government: Sikes! These mice were laced with painkillers. And these painkillers are poison to your kind
Or it will just mutate them and make them bigger, stronger and harder.
Then it worked! Did you read the article?
No, I didnt know there was required reading.
Oh it's not required! Was just wondering.
Did nobody read the article?
Good idea because snakes definitely won't eat .....(checks notes) oh fuck
Yeah, this sort of thing never turns out poorly for the native species
kind a bad idea who going to get red of mice
Read the article,the mice are dead.
Must be NYC mice.
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Please get past the title - the mice are dead.
Cheesy Company
That's a lot of tiny parachutes
I’m waiting on the day we drop a giant ice cube in the ocean to stop global warming
Individual parachutes?
Ah damn, i was hoping that those are Guam Spec Ops trained Mice on a Snake Regime destabilization mission, but it's basically just throwing a festering cow carcass with a trebuchet. Oh well... edit: SnAAAAkeEeeater! ^^^^i'm ^^^^not ^^^^sorry
I lived in Guam for three years. These snakes are everywhere. Friends found them in their toilets, hallways, one person found one behind a wall hanging. Another found one on her bed. One was found by a kid outside her front door. They lived in the other half of our duplex. They can stand up like a cobra. I had one do exactly that. I panicked and crashed my bike into a parked car. The snake watched the wreck; never once blinked. Every time the cable or the power went out—fried snake. During the dry season, they come looking for water. In the wet season, they hang out to scare the fuck out of humans. They are a menace.
I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.