A kid’s dose of this common drug is more than enough to poison snakes!

When the Department of Agriculture went looking for a potent poison to kill thousands of brown tree snakes in Guam, what did it come up with?

Acetaminophen.

That’s right, the exact same ingredient in Tylenol is the poison of choice when you want to kill snakes fast. And it doesn’t take too much of it, either.

All you need is 80 mg of the drug. And that’s half the dose of Tylenol given to a two-year-old! When the snakes eat mice laced with acetaminophen, they go into a coma and die.

The government has been trying to get rid of the snakes in Guam for some time. The pests snuck into the island decades ago, hiding in the wheel wells of planes. And once they got to Guam they settled right in, which wasn’t good news for the native bird population.

The acetaminophen-poisoned mice, with green paper banners attached, are dropped from planes and float down to the tree tops where the snakes can find them.

This method has been so successful in killing them that it’s been done three times already. The latest drop of 2,000 poisoned mice was the biggest one yet.

Sources:

“Dead mice update: tiny assassins dropped on Guam again” Mark Memmott, December 3, 2013, the two-way, npr.org