Home (Brown tree snake)
Home  
 
 
Home » Animals » Brown tree snake


 

Brown tree snake

Animals Brown towheeBrown Treecreeper

Brown tree snake - Introduced Species Summary Project
Columbia University. Center for Environmental Research and Conservation.

 


The USGS has a comprehensive account of the Brown Tree Snake vs. Guam story here ...

On Guam, brown tree snakes found dense forests that were teeming with the birds and small lizards that are their natural foods. No enemies slowed their spread, and their numbers mushroomed.

The history of this decline starts shortly after the introduction of the Brown tree snake, although appreciable losses were not evident until the 1960s.

Sometime between 1944 and 1952, the brown tree snake Boiga irregularis arrived on Guam, most likely on cargo ships. The snake's population rapidly increased because there was lots of prey (such as the Guam rails) and no natural predators.

Guam had no large native snakes, but in the 1940s, people began to notice a new kind of reptile on the island: brown tree snakes.

The Guam Micronesian kingfisher is no longer found in the wild where it was driven almost to extinction by predation by the brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) that was introduced to the island.

Other Pteropus species are known to be preyed upon by snakes, such as brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis). However, beyond reports of humans killing these animals, information pertaining to specific predators of P. poliocephalus was not found.

Also known as the Ko'Ko', the Guam rail fell victim to a nonnative brown tree snake introduced to its home on the island of Guam. The snakes fed on the flightless birds, which now exist only in captivity.

The endangered Guam rail once flourished on Guam but is extinct there due to the introduction of the brown tree snake. A small number of birds from an experimental breeding program live on Rota, an island just south of Guam.
Status ...

the predaceous flatworm, Platydemus manokwari, populations of slugs have been greatly reduced because of the introduction of the Cane Toad, Bufo marinus, and the shrew populations on Guam are low because of the introduction of the Brown Tree Snake.

Hawaii, where 30% of all known recently extinct bird taxa originally lived. Other areas, such as Guam, have also been hit hard; Guam has lost over 60% of its native bird taxa in the last 30 years, many of them due to the introduced Brown Tree Snake.

See also: Snake, Lizard, Kingfisher, Skink, Gecko

Animals Brown towheeBrown Treecreeper

 
 rssRSS