Find funding for snake inspections

Nudged by Pacific regional members of Congress, the Obama administration has provided federal funds for a program that had relied on the much-maligned earmark to prevent the spread of invasive brown tree snakes from Guam to Hawaii. The change of venue, made necessary by the congressional ban on earmarks early this year, should move the issue from silly politics to an understanding of nature and the danger of a species moving from its native environment into another.

U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye has reliably earmarked several million dollars a year for a program aimed at shielding Hawaii from the brown tree snake, a program derided as political pork by groups such as the Citizens Against Government Waste and politicians like Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Tell that to House member Madeleine Z. Bordallo of Guam, where brown tree snakes arrived from the Solomon Islands aboard military vessels during World War II and proceeded to eliminate 10 of Guam’s 13 native forest bird species. The snakes on Guam now number in the thousands, with estimates of 3,000 per square mile.

"Unlike native species, non-natives arrive in their new homes with no shared evolutionary history with most other organisms already there," explain ecologists Sara Kuebbing and Dan Simberloff of the University of Tennessee and Rutgers’ Julie Lockwood in the current issue of The Scientist magazine. "They leave their predators, parasites and competitors behind, and they often attain huge population sizes, occupy large areas and heavily impact native species and ecosystems."

Bordallo, Inouye and other members of Congress from Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands asked U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in June to maintain funding for the inspection and eradication program. While eight brown snakes are known to have entered Oahu since 1981, only one was found to have entered the island after federal inspection of trips began in 1994, mostly of cargo leaving Guam for Hawaii via the Navy and Air Force.

Funding of the inspection program would have dried up last Friday, the end of the last fiscal year, but the Pentagon has steered $2.4 million and Interior Department $500,000 to the rescue of the program overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s wildlife service section. The money is expected to last only nine months, and Mike Pitzler, who oversees the program, says he will look for ways to restructure and cut costs, if possible.

Clearly, opponents of what they call "pork" are likely to attack the program at its new funding station. Proponents know better: A University of Hawaii study has determined that invasion of the state by the brown tree snake could cause annual economic damage of more than $2 billion in medical care from snake bites, power outages and tourism losses.

Given the political pressures to cut the federal budget, Hawaii’s congressional delegation will have a chore in assuring continued financing after nine months. But the cost of tree-snake inspections is a pittance compared to the cost of a tree-snake invasion.