Foreign Devils Ravaging Okinawa

[Charles]

[SIZE="3"]Marines defend Camp Gonsalves from encroaching mongoose[/SIZE]
Non-native species now being trapped with regularity

CAMP GONSALVES, Okinawa — The 8,735-acre Jungle Warfare Training Center for Marines shelters numerous threatened and endangered species indigenous to Japan.
Ongoing research has made increasingly apparent the center also has become home to the nonindigenous mongoose. So much so that a new trapping effort the Marine Corps launched a few weeks ago has been bagging an average of one mongoose every two days.
Mongooses were released in Okinawa in 1910 to control the habu snake population — an effort that failed, Marine Corps Camp Butler Environmental Branch entomologist Mitsugu Sugiyama said. Habu snakes are nocturnal and mongooses are active during the day “so there aren’t many opportunities for them to encounter each other,” he said.
Instead of battling snakes, mongooses have been migrating north and going for easier prey: birds, other reptiles and insects such as the 14 endangered species found on the training center. ...more...