Gough Island is overrun with rats. Why can they eat seabirds?

Tristan da Cunha is a volcanic archipelago located in the South Atlantic Ocean, connecting Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina in South America, and Cape Town (Cape of Good Hope) in South Africa. ) are connected, and the middle position is where the Tristan da Cunha Islands are located. This archipelago is about 2816km from South Africa and 3360km from South America. Gough Island is part of it, located 400 kilometers southeast of Tristan Island. The island is about 12.8 kilometers long and 6.4 kilometers wide.

Gough Island is one of the British Overseas Territories and is a volcanic island. Gough Island is considered one of the islands least affected by human intervention and is home to a large number of rare flora and fauna. There are 54 species of rare seabirds on Gough Island, and there are few mammals besides seals and walruses, but the exotic rat is an exception.

About 150 years ago, a group of whalers came to this island to rest, and with their ship came rats. From a few scattered rats at the beginning, there have been nearly one million rats on Gough Island. This is all due to their ultra-short breeding cycle and strong reproductive capacity. The most important point is that there are almost no natural enemies of rats on Gough Island, which has also caused their size to increase accordingly. The British house rats on Gough Island have been completely transformed, and their size has increased to more than three times their previous size. What's even more frightening is that they have changed their eating habits and become carnivores.

The food source of this group of giant rats is the rare seabirds on Gough Island. Some people may be surprised that flying seabirds are killed by small rats, but that is the fact. Mice are generally active at night, and those seabirds are no different from blind people at night. For example, the weight of an albatrosses chick can reach more than 10 kilograms. These mice weigh less than a hundred grams, but the scary thing is that the mice all go out in groups. ***Same attack on a baby bird. It's like a hippopotamus that comes ashore and is stared at by a group of spotted hyenas. It's almost impossible to escape.

Flying bird parents and bird mothers have never seen such a scene. Although they can fly, they can't stop their babies from being eaten. Researchers who went to Gough Island found that more than 60% of the baby birds died in their nests, and the culprit was this group of outsiders. Because they have developed and evolved on the island for tens of thousands of years, these rare seabirds have never encountered such a situation. Suddenly a group of "robbers" came, which was a disaster for the island's native creatures.

It's like when Homo sapiens came to Australia for the first time. How had the local animals seen this kind of two-legged beast? Of course they wouldn't be afraid. But after Homo sapiens came to Australia, they didn't. Over time, the native giant marsupials became extinct.

These are unimaginable. The largest seabird on the earth, the albatross, is actually attacked by mice. No one may believe it, but this is what happened. The British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds also organized personnel to put rat poison on the island, but the effect was very little. It is difficult for even humans to completely eliminate this animal. On an uninhabited island, it is even more lawless. Being harmless "food", it's no surprise that they triple in size.

Article/Science Black Hole, picture source is network intrusion and deletion.