Technology shows stunning potential in pest battles
A robot zaps and vacuums up venomous lionfish in Bermuda. A helicopter pelts Guam’s trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boat with giant winglike nets stuns and catches Asian carp in the American Midwest.
In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, new technology is being combined with old methods such as weed pulling, trapping and pesticides.
Finding new weapons is crucial because invasive species are costly. They are also one of the leading causes of extinction on islands, such as Guam, according to Piero Genovesi, an Italian scientist who chairs the invasive species task force for an international organisation.
‘‘We have totally new were just unthinkable a ago,’’ Genovesi said.
One example: there are companies that market traps for wild pigs that are triggered by cellphones.
A new underwater robot is targeting the stunning but dangerous lionfish, which has spread over the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and up the US East Coast as far north as New York’s Long Island, with venomous spines that are dangerous to touch. With no tools that few years natural predators in the Atlantic Ocean, the voracious aquarium fish devour large amounts of other fish, including key commercial species.
The robot is the creation of Colin Angle, chief executive officer of IRobot, which makes vacuum cleaners. Along with his wife, Erika, and colleagues, he created a new non-profit organisation to turn automation into environmental tools.
The robot, called Guardian LF1, uses what Angle says is a gentle shock to immobilise the lionfish before they are sucked alive into a tube.
In its first public outing this month, the robot caught 15 lionfish during two days of testing in Bermuda. Top chefs competed in a cook-off of the captured fish.
A few decades ago, native birds started disappearing from the Pacific island of Guam, baffling scientists until they found that non-native brown tree snakes were eating all the birds and their eggs.
The snakes, which live in the trees, had no natural enemies and just trapping them wasn’t working, Gosnell said. But they did prove to have one enemy: the painkiller acetaminophen.
So biologists came up with a plan: use painkiller pills glued to dead fetal mice as bait. The mice are put in tubes, and dropped by helicopter in batches of 3000. The mice pop out, and the whole contraption dangles in the trees. It’s still experimental, but it will soon go to more regular use.
US Fish and Wildlife officials are using souped-up old technology to catch Asian carp, a fish that has taken over rivers and lakes in the US Midwest. They use a specialised boat – dubbed the Magna Carpa – with giant winglike nets, which uses electric current as an underwater stun gun to shock the fish, says biologist Emily Pherigo.
At higher doses, the fish are killed and float to the surface. In just five minutes, the officials can collect 500 fish, which are turned into fertiliser.