The last time a rat found its way to Alaska’s St. Paul Island, in 2018, residents took nearly a year to find and kill it. Officials fear another rat has arrived, and they have enlisted residents and the federal government on a fevered hunt to catch it.
St. Paul Island is a tiny land mass in the Bering Sea that boasts a stunning array of wildlife, including rare sea birds and fur seals. Wildlife experts say a rat infestation could easily upset the delicate balance that allows the island’s wildlife to thrive.
The potential disruption is why it went on alert in June, when the Ecosystem Conservation Office, an agency in the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government, received a call from a resident who claimed to have spotted a rat.
The office’s director, Lauren Divine, investigated. “I immediately started asking questions and started crawling under the porch,” she said in a call on Tuesday.
Her team looked for signs of a rat, like droppings and chew marks, and aimed flashlights at dark corners. It deployed traps loaded with peanut butter and field cameras. It also called in what Dr. Divine described as a “rat strike team,” which includes various federal agencies who assist in case an invasive species makes it to the island.
The island’s roughly 400 residents were told to look for signs of a rat. An infestation would be catastrophic for St. Paul, which has been called the Galápagos of the North.
St. Paul Island, which comprises about 40 square miles of land, is about 750 miles west of Anchorage. Northern fur seals and birds, such as red-faced cormorants, tufted puffins and far eastern curlews, call the island home.
A rat infestation, also known as a “rat spill,” could be even more harmful than an oil spill, said Wes Jolley, the U.S. head of operations at Island Conservation, a group that works to restore islands damaged by invasive species. The nonprofit was involved with the recovery of Alaska’s Hawadax Island, which was known as Rat Island before rodents were cleared from it more than a decade ago.
Rats can be disruptive because they are small, will eat almost anything, reproduce rapidly and stowaway on shipping vessels.
On the island, rats can have a direct negative effect, such as killing and eating birds. The death of those birds can lead to more problems because their contributions to the ecosystem decrease. Without as many seabirds, the island could lose nutrients that they carry from the sea, creating problems for other wildlife.
This is why it is crucial for St. Paul to track down even a single rat, Mr. Jolley said. “One is your opportunity to get it before it starts really accelerating and rapidly becoming a more significant issue,” he added.
Rat prevention efforts are in place on St. Paul Island year-round. At each port of entry, there are 55-gallon drums crafted to be irresistible to rats, luring them in with warmth and bait so they can be trapped.
Educators, scientists, artists and others were also at the island’s school this week to teach students about invasive species, and how students can fight against them, for its annual Bering Sea Days.
“This is a very engaged, aware community that cares a lot about their island and their resources and is willing to really be engaged in these types of activities,” Dr. Divine said.
The island has had to contend with other unwanted creatures, she said. One resident found and killed a black widow spider on a grocery pallet, and red foxes have floated to the island on ice.
Prevention and response efforts are costly and are often paid for by grants, Dr. Divine said. They are even more expensive for the island when an invasive species is detected and needs to be found. Dr. Divine said the efforts to find the rat could receive a major boost in the next few months if officials could bring in a rat-sniffing dog. Federal agencies are working to carve out an exception to a law that prohibits dogs on the island.
The single-rat intervention is important because it is quicker and less expensive, and also because the potential for rat infestations is growing worse with climate change, Dr. Divine said.
The area used to be too cold most of the year for a rat to survive, but the warming climate has made Alaska more hospitable for rats, she said. The number of ships has also increased in Alaska’s waters, resulting in more vessels in the area that could be harboring rodents. A rat would also compound other problems that climate change is causing there, such as a decline in species and coastal erosion, Dr. Divine said.
“All over the globe rats have caused catastrophic devastation to island communities and to uninhabited islands and their wildlife,” Dr. Divine said. “So we do take it really, really seriously.”
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