Drones against rats

Excerpts from a Wired report:

Beginning in August 2021, the conservation group Island Conservation will employ a novel approach in an attempt to clear the rat population from Tetiaroa Atoll (as well as two other islands in French Polynesia): drones. By using specially-engineered drones to blanket the islands with rat poison, the charity will implement the world’s first scalable, heavy-lift drone operation to remove invasive rats.

A previous effort to rid Tetiaroa of rats in 2012 failed. For an eradication to be successful, 100 per cent of the rats on an island have to be killed.  A single pregnant rat can overrun a 1,000 hectare island within two years. In 2012, it took 35 volunteers four months to spread poison pellets by hand over 100 hectares.

Tetiaroa supports thousands of nesting seabirds, including four IUCN locally threatened species, making it one of the key seabird breeding sites within French Polynesia. The atoll is also a major nesting site for green sea turtles – all of which are threatened by rat predation.