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Island of Montecristo to be bombed with poison after rat infestation
Monday, January 16, 2012 23:13
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It was immortalised by the novelist Alexandre Dumas as the location for a stash of buried treasure, but the tiny Italian island of Montecristo is now struggling with a rather less romantic reality – a plague of black rats.
Island of Montecristo to be bombed with poison after rat infestation
HERE .. Biologists estimate that there is one rat for every square yard of the island and say they pose a grave threat to the ecology of the nature reserve, which is part of a scattered archipelago of islands off Tuscany.
The uninhabited island, a protected nature reserve lying between the coast of Tuscany and Corsica, has been invaded by thousands of black rats.
The rodents are believed to have arrived on the four-square-mile island as stowaways on boats a few years ago but have now multiplied.
Authorities are planning to use aircraft to bombard the island with poison pellets in a bid to tackle the infestation.
The plan is to drop around 26 tonnes of pellets on the island at the end of this month.
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