What really turns a brown tree snake on? That’s the question Rocky Parker, a chemical ecologist at James Madison University in Virginia, has been trying to answer these past few years, and it hasn’t been easy. To communicate with members of the opposite sex, “the snakes don’t just use a single chemical cue or a couple [of] cues,” Parker says. “They are using this bouquet of odors.”
But there’s good reason to narrow in on the chemicals that matter: luring brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) into traps using sex pheromones is one tactic that Parker believes could help stem an infestation that has plagued the island of Guam for decades. While baiting traps with synthetic pheromones has proven to be an effective method to capture and kill insects, the approach has seen limited success with vertebrates such as rodents, and it has never been shown to successfully control reptile populations.
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