Rats—Crabs—Birds

How PAA Unwittingly Upset Nature's Balance at Wake Is.

SUVA, Sept. 27.

SINGULARLY interesting is the story told here by staff men of Pan American. Airways of how PAA upset the balance of nature in Wake Island, a few years ago.

The PAA station was established there, as part of the North Pacific service, on one of the three wooded islets which com prise the atoll. Whether it was due to the human incursion, or whether it had always been that way, history does not say; but soon the Americans were driven near to madness by countless hordes of rats.

Finally, a couple of expert rat exter minators were sent from San Francisco, and one of the islets was handed over to them. They got the rats to eat a poison which drove them to water, and when they drank water they died. Soon, the shores of the island were literally car peted with dead rats.

The islets teem with hermit crabs, which are the scavengers of the atoll.

The crabs, of course, feasted upon the bodies of the rats. The next stage was that the hermit crabs died in thousands, all over the islet.

The sea-birds, which had displayed no interest in dead rats, pounced upon the dead hermit crabs. Within some three weeks of the rat experts starting their work, countless dead sea-birds were scattered over the islet.

Then the PAA establishment woke up.

The stench from the decaying carcases of the sea-birds was beyond description.

The islet’s scavengers had been wiped out—there was nothing now to remove decaying and disease-breeding matter, such as the bodies of the seabirds.

There was a hurried conference. The activities of the rat-poisoners were can celled. As soon as the bodies of the dead

rats were regarded as harmless, parties of men went to the other islets, trapped as many hermit-crabs as they could bundled the astonished creatures into bags, and carried them off to the de crabbed islet. 4.i_ T J lere were released, with a prayer that soon they would multiply, and so restore the balance of nature.

The Case Of The Minah

But Fiji need not go beyond Suva for its own example of how the balance of nature can be upset.

The town echoes and re-echoes to the chirping and twittering of swarms of minahs and bulbuls; while the jungle is full of mongoose. All are imports from India. None seems to know why the birds were brought in; but the Mongoose was introduced to kill the rats in the plantations.

These sturdy, adaptable creatures have taken complete possession, and driven all native birds, and all small fauna, into the remote recesses of the big island of Viti Levu. Nowadays, there is not one native bird to be seen.

Fijian fauna survives on the other big islands, however—the Indian birds do not appear to be there yet, in any numbers.