Black rats have been slowly dominating Anacapa Island, which is a chain of rugged volcanic islets off Southern California that acts as one of the West Coast’s most important seabird nesting grounds. They were introduced accidentally by ships in the early 1900s, spread across the island, and began feeding on eggs, chicks, and native wildlife. Biologists had documented the scale of the damage by the late 1990s. Black rats were consuming about 70% of the eggs laid by the threatened Scripps’s murrelet, which is a small seabird that nests in rocky crevices found on only a handful of islands. According to the Channel Islands National Park , the losses threatened the future of one of the species’ largest breeding colonies, prompting one of North America’s most ambitious island restoration projects.
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