Intensive search for BTS on Rota continues

As of yesterday, there has not been anything conclusive yet whether the brown tree snake captured on Sept. 3 on Rota was a stowaway or from a population of snakes on Rota, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Sylvan Igisomar, coordinator and biologist for the CNMI BTS program.

“We have not gotten enough data to be conclusive. Right now we are still deploying traps and we are still searching nightly,” Igisomar said.

According to him, night searches have gone from 7pm to 11pm since operations began, covering a majority of Rota’s Songsong area, with traps monitored during daytime.

“We are saturating [the area], moving northward strategically, placing those traps in forested areas, residential areas as well,” he said.

He said if the weather had permitted yesterday, 246 traps total would already be deployed on the island.

Initially, according to Igisomar, there were 46 traps on Rota, with an additional 200 provided by the U.S. Geological Survey in Guam.

A hundred of the additional traps were deployed last Friday, he said.

The CNMI BTS program has a total of nine personnel with Igisomar as its coordinator.

Staff has been rotating on and off island, with the USGS team doing the same, according to him.

They are four USGS biologists on Rota, with five from the CNMI Division of Fish and Wildlife.

Igisomar called the first few weeks of operations the most intensive, as the setup phase of operations includes the four-hour mandatory night searches, along with trap monitoring, agency and manpower coordinating, report and press release writing as some of their efforts.

“Folks are working around the clock up there. We’re trying to juggle those things…to find a balance so folks are getting enough rest,” Igisomar said, who personally has been working 12- to 14-hour days.

“Hopefully by mid this week all the traps will be set up,” he said noting that setup is where most of the manpower effort is.

He said the community response to their efforts on Rota has been “very good.”

“They’re concerned about their environment. We’ve been getting permission to setup traps and do searches around people’s backyards,” he said.

If a snake is found, he said it should be killed immediately; if not, people can notify the 28-SNAKE hotline as soon as possible.

He said “time is critical” in stifling a potential BTS problem on the islands.

“The brown tree snake is a very elusive animal and as we can see from what it’s done to Guam, it’s very destructive, so we ask the public, if you see one, kill it…try to separate the head from the body to make sure that it is dead, [or] crush its head. Because once it gets away, it’s very difficult to find,” he said.