UNITED NATIONS, May 8 (UPI) -- The United Nations will funnel $200,000 to a tiny Pacific Island country to help it fight the biggest threat its local economy faces: tree-leaping rats.
Young coconuts are at risk on the nine coral islands of Tuvalu, where nimble black rats jump between palms and gnaw through the shells, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported Monday. Coconuts and copra (a coconut oil) are a major island export.
The rats -- whose scientific name is rattus rattus -- are not only eating the country out of its prized crop. Their insatiable appetites are also destroying the diet of the world's largest land invertebrates, the agency said.
Coconut crabs, usually the size of small cats, dine on fallen coconuts, which they wrangle with claws capable of lifting rocks weighing 30 kilos. Once ubiquitous in the Pacific Islands, their numbers are dwindling because of their slow growth rates and their popularity on some islands as a culinary delicacy.
The FAO is bringing Tuvalu's rodent expert out of retirement to oversee its pesticide plan. The agency will fill recycled Australian pineapple cans with poisoned bait and dangle the cans just above the ground -- too high for coconut crabs but within reach of the rats, who can leap up to a meter into the air. The agency will also wrap the island's palm trunks in metal sheets, to keep rats from scurrying to the top.
The rats, however, do not threaten Tuvalu's most reliable revenue source. The country has leased its internet domain suffix -- .tv -- to an American Web hosting company for $50 million.
