Rat Run

The last rat patrol:

Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the slave trade—wrecked there, says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, a French overseas region off the coast of Madagascar. Tromelin Island was probably home to at least eight different seabird species, including hundreds of thousands of frigate birds, terns, and boobies, before the rodents arrived. But, like on countless other islands around the world, the rats ate their way through those birds’ eggs, eventually decimating the populations. By 2005, when researchers and French authorities finally began eradicating the rodents, only two bird species were left: a few hundred pairs of masked and red-footed boobies.

The rats had to go...