Today ’s dispatch from the Annals of Wacky Conservation Schemes is a doozy . The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ( USFWS ) plans to use drone [ PDF ] to scatter hundreds of thousands of peanut butter treats across the Montana prairie in fiat to save an adorable endangered Mustela nigripes .
Similar to previous plans involvingpoisonous toad frog sausagesand Styrofoam - stuffeddead turtles , this plan only seems silly until you study the backstory . The taradiddle in Montana is a relatively simple one . Once upon a time , black - footed ferrets ( Mustela nigripes ) ate prairie dogs ( genusCynomys ) , and everyone fly high . Then along came the prairie frank plague ( Yersinia pestis — yes , the very bacteria creditworthy for the Black Death ) , which massacred the prairie dogs and allow the ferrets with nothing to eat . Their numbers dwindled , and dwindle away , and dwindled . They would have give way out altogether , had it not been for USFWS wildlife managers , who rescued enough ferrets to jump a good for you imprisoned population , then introduced them back into the wild .
The effortswere a relative success : Today , alternatively of extinct , the black - footed Mustela nigripes is justseriously imperil , with few than 300 somebody left in the wild . But the root of the entire problem — the flea - borne plague — remains at large .
Y. pestisis voracious [ PDF ] , but it can be cease ; Scientists develop a vaccine against the disease in the early 2000s . pick out the impracticality of assail up the prairie dogs individually for stab ( and who has that many bantam Band - assist ? ) , they devised a apt alternative : englut the vaccinum into chewy , groundnut - butter flavored prairie dog delicacy .
The vaccinum worked , as did the peanut butter . In fact , it might have work a little too well , order biologist Randy Matchett of the USFWS . “ We have to drop one bait every 30 feet , ” hetoldWIRED . “ If we do n’t spread them out uniformly , one big , fat prairie dog could eat them all . ”
In gild to extinguish the pestis , USFWS will have to disperse 350,000 prairie dog goody , 30 feet apart , over 1200 demesne , by the goal of summer 2016 . squad members had been laying the handmade treats across the prairie one at a prison term , but they speedily realized they ’d never meet their deadline .
enroll two very unlike equipment : an automated carp - bait machine called theBoilieRollerand a treat - dispensing drone . The BoilieRoller produces uniformly - sized indulgent pellet , which in this case means medicated prairie firedog kickshaw . Once he ’s pile up a full armory of peanut vine butter bullets , Matchett hopes to load them into an miniature catapult attached to an aerial poke , which will be control via GPS . If all goes according to programme , he says , the resulting robo - vaccinator could scatter 400 State Department in an hr .
At this point , the delicacy machine is still theoretic , but the squad is aiming to complete a proof - of - construct design by August .
[ h / tWIRED ]
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