And finally, it was determined that the brown tree snake, which had been introduced from, probably Manus, which was native to New Guinea and Northern Australia had become established by, as well as they could determine, by a Navy surplus equipment, shipped into Guam, was causing a great deal of economic trouble as well as environmental by destroying the native birds. It was also causing almost every night, blackouts, by climbing the wires as a nocturnal arboreal snake. Climbing the wires, crawling across the electric primaries and frying itself. But the numbers of these snakes increased to enormous population sizes, ’cause the same situation as rats and cockroaches. There were a few predators, almost none, dogs and cats were about the only thing that was preying on the brown tree snake. And as arboreal nocturnal snakes, they were reproducing well with, the predator pressure was almost nonexistent and the prey base was huge because they were omnivores and they fed… The little ones ate, mostly lizards, the young ones, and the older ones, rats and birds. So our concern and our involvement in that began with realizing that there was very little inspection of the airplanes, particularly military aircraft, ’cause there was a much more traffic in military aircraft coming in than a commercial aircraft.
