Ah, to be knowing that within a few days you'll be sent off to the far ends of the earth, only to be thrown on a small island with thousands of venomous snakes. Now, this may sound like a Jonesian nightmare to some, but to an aspiring herpetologist, it's pretty cool.
The main aspect of this job that still remains in the air is when I'll be leaving. This really isn't a big deal, with the exception that I still have bills and no steady income. However, I'll probably be doing some field work for my uncle, who owns a surveying company (www.whitemountainsurvey.com) as a little supplemental income. Originally, I was probably going to head out at the end of this week. Now it's more likely to be the 26th or 27th.
I'm very excited about this job and it's really an amazing opportunity. This is a pretty well known study in the biological world: basically a worst -case scenario example of an introduced species. The brown treesnakes were accidentally introduced to Guam soon after WWII, most likely brought as stow-aways in cargo vessels. Once on the island, the snakes flourished due to an abundant prey base, ideal climate, and complete lack of predators. To make matters worse, they reproduce up to twice a year (about a dozen eggs every time) and the females can store sperm... for years. Thus any female snake that has ever mated has the potential to establish a new population elsewhere.
While reveling in their seemingly unending bounty, the snakes extirpated 9 of 11 native forest birds, 2 of 3 native bats, and seriously reduced the numbers of native lizards. Fortunately for the brown treesnake, introduced lizards are still plentiful (their favorite snack now). This destruction has lead to secondary ecological effects, too, where insects formerly kept in check by the now extirpated species are reproducing without impediment. Also, many native plant species are declining due to lack of pollinators and seed dispersers. All this before mentioning that the brown treesnakes have a tendency to bite infants and cost millions of dollars in power outages every year.
It's almost never (never say a definitive "never" in the biological world- this could be your demise) a good idea to introduce a species. This is a fact that has been proven time and time again, with wonderful things like kudzu, cane toads, gypsy moths, zebra mussels, and mongoose in the Hawaiian islands. In the latter example, mongoose were introduced to eradicate another introduced species: the rat (Indiana's father hates these particular lovelies). As well intended as this introduction was, there was a major flaw in the logic: rats are nocturnal while mongoose are diurnal. So, instead of eating the rats, the mongoose went after the quite defenseless native ground-nesting birds, whose populations were already in trouble from rat predation. Ugh.
So, this is a great job to be working on and, I feel, an important one. If I can play a part in reducing the population of brown treesnakes, helping to repair some of the damage they have caused, and prevent their spread to other islands, I'll consider myself a success. If, however, I go and get myself eaten by a belligerent pack of spit-snorting snakes, I'll be very ashamed of myself. Hopefully it will be the former.
My next entry will likely be once I'm on Guam. In the meantime, if you're interested in this study, definitely check out the USGS site Joe has posted in his January 8th entry (http://www.mesc.usgs.gov/resources/education/bts/bts_home.asp). This site is fantastic and has an incredibly thorough synopsis of the situation on Guam.