2 Million Snakes Have Taken Over The Island Of Guam (HBO)

lately the tiny American island of Guam has been threatened with annihilation by kim jeong-hoon but it's already been overrun by a foreign enemy brown tree snakes the snakes likely arrived on the island on a cargo ship or military aircraft in the 1950s and now outnumber people on Guam by ten to one every effort to eradicate the invasive species has so far failed vice news went on a night hunt with a biologist who's tracking down brown tree snakes one by one it's estimated here on Guam that there's anywhere between one to two million snakes Guam has no native snakes of the native animals head no way to react to such a predator they didn't know what it was so with no way to stop that snake it just came in and spread over the entire island so there are several species of birds that are no longer found here on Guam at all all the ones that were here are gone the forest just completely changed all the native species are so much rarer now than they used to be one of the things that we look for when we're looking for snakes is our light reflecting off of their shiny scales it can be really difficult right after a rain because everything's shiny this one's gonna be super easy to catch here on Guam nobody likes the brown tree snake they eat their chickens they eat a small cat so they're they're a real nuisance to people in their home life they'll get in your house there have been reports in the past of them coming up through the toilet which is terrifying the goal of the USGS is to eradicate the brown tree snake to do that they need to understand how the snakes behave after they catch them they take them to a lab where the implant tracking devices inside each snake so they can study their movements the data is then used for various methods of eradication such as placement of traps and poison we're doing what we call morphing of these things we're collecting data on their size their weight the gender of the snakes so brown tree snakes are technically venomous they're just not really any threat to someone my size or an adult person a visual check for the male is just kind of roll and Express and that tube that pops out is a Hemi penis so that indicates it's a male these containers are what we're housing our snakes in for surgery right now before surgery they're in there they've got a little water they've got a place to hide so that they kind of can feel safe in this stressful environment we're using ISO chlorine it's a inhalable anesthetic and put the snake's head in this end and it's gonna start inhaling that in anesthesia so when they're completely under will have that amount of time 15 20 minutes however long just do the surgery so I'll go ahead and start with a small incision [Music] and we'll take our transmitter you just slip it inside the body cavity just like that so the transmitter itself is less than 5% of the snakes total body weight has to be small enough that it's not going to add a significant amount of weight to the snake itself we're ending the surgery by putting in a few sutures and closing the incision at the transmitter site we're gonna move the snake over to the recovery area I'm gonna put this tube in the glottis and give it a couple of breaths and this helps get any left over isoflurane anesthesia out and simulate a breathing response and the snake will monitor it for a while to make sure it starts breathing on its own again and then early next week we'll let it go back into the wild where it was caught and we'll start our telemetry study tracking them out in the wild so it's definitely working and you can hear like as we get farther away he was fighting fighting the more that we know about these individuals the easier it is to find control methods to help suppress them or eradicate them I definitely think that we can get the snake population to a point where native species can be reintroduced you you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 1,080,670

Rating: 4.7334895 out of 5

Keywords: brown tree snakes, 2 Million Snakes Have Taken Over The Island Of Guam, snakes guam infestation, vice snakes guam, brown tree snake video, guam, snake invasion, vice, vice news, vice news tonight, HBO, snakes, ecosystem, Department of Defense, invasion, happening now, forest, environment, problem, investation, science, territory, law enforcement, danger, snake island, python hunters, vice python, vice news HBO, snake florida, python florida, patrick barnhart, us geological survey

Id: EKTP4k-X_Oc

Length: 5min 16sec (316 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018