Japan has declared that all mongooses on a tropical island have been eradicated, according to officials, because the animals turned their backs on the endangered local rabbits instead of ignoring the poisonous snakes they were brought in to hunt.
In the late 1970s, about 30 of the venom-resistant animals were released on Amami Oshima, a UNESCO World Heritage site, to reduce the number of habu, a crater snake whose bite can be fatal to people.
However, the snakes are mainly active at night when mongoose prefer to go to sleep, and their numbers have fallen dramatically as a result as the toothy mammals gave native Amami rabbits their voracious appetites.
” It is said that the mongooses, which are effective during the day, often came into contact with the nocturnal habu lizards”, a local official told AFP.
The endangered rats are only found on Amami Oshima and one another area, according to the IUCN red list, which includes the endangered species.
By 2000, the animal population had grown to about 10,000, and Chinese authorities had started a fight against the disease that reportedly included specially trained sniffing dogs.
The authorities declared the beach mongoose-free on Tuesday, about 25 decades after the start of that program and almost 50 since the ill-fated program began.
“( This ) is genuinely good news for our prefecture and for conservation of World Natural Heritage site Amami’s precious ecosystem”, local governor Koichi Shiota said in a statement.
The impact that mongoose species have had on the local ecosystem and the efforts and costs that we must use to eradicate it are some lessons we need to learn, he said.
A UN panel reported in 2023 that more than 37, 000 mysterious types have perished far from their original locations, costing upward of$ 400 billion in damage and lost earnings.
