In 1884, St. Croix had a rat problem in its sugarcane fields, and a small predator seemed like the perfect answer. Over the following decades, a native lizard disappeared from nearly all of its historic range there, and mongooses had a hand in that.
Small Indian mongooses were brought to the island to control those rats, according to a study in the journal Oryx by Nicole Angeli and Lee Fitzgerald.
Scientists introduced lizards to two more islands. The Puerto Rican ground lizard was first reported in St. St. The island’s landscape was changing too. The mongoose arrived in the middle of those changes. The St. Croix racer is a snake found only on this island. The study also paints the mongoose as an aggressive predator that has devastated the island’s biodiversity. However, the paper doesn’t provide many details on what happened to the snake, so it’s best not to oversimplify. Two lizard groups managed to survive on small islands off the shore, the Protestant Cay and the Green Cay. Mongooses were not present on these islands. Another warning comes from Treglia and colleagues. If it reaches the cays, it may prey on and compete with the native lizard for food .
Croix is about 218 square kilometers (roughly 21,800 hectares). Between 1754 and 1800, its plantations shifted from cotton to sugarcane. Rats became a problem in those fields, so mongooses were released in 1884 to control them. By 1917, nearly 90% of the island’s native forests and woodlands had been cleared for farming or logging, the study notes. A 2013 paper by Michael Treglia and colleagues in the Caribbean Journal of Science lists it as one of the island’s endemic reptiles and says it is extinct. Nine lizards were introduced to Ruth Island in 1989, while 57 lizards were brought to Buck Island in 2008. There are about 3,000 lizards surviving on these four islands, and more than 2,000 of them are on Buck Island, according to Angeli and Fitzgerald. Together, the islands cover only 85 hectares, so storms like hurricanes are still a risk. Croix in 2006.
