One more building, one more pet, and one more science story

Here is a picture of the complex that includes the garage and machine shop on the left. In the middle are the offices for the station manager and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife officer. To the right of that is the air conditioned "wet lab" and a computer "dry lab". On the far right is the outdoor covered area with 5 large work benches for the science teams to use. You can see in front the all important antennas that provide WiFi access, the only means of communication with the outside world.

I posted earlier a picture of Dadu, the dog The Nature Conservancy inherited from the previous owner. Here is a picture of the cat they inherited, Tigger.

One of the projects being done by Meg of U.S. Fish & Wildlife is to get rid of the coconut trees on some of the islands. The concern is that coconut palms are crowding out the native Pisonia trees. A contributing factor to the large number of coconuts was a failed attempt throughout much of the 1980's at farming the coconuts commercially. Palmyra has one of the largest remaining stands of Pisonia forest in the Pacific, and the large population of birds rely on the Pisonia tree for nesting and roosting. In order to get rid of the adult coconut trees, Meg is drilling holes in the tree trunks and then filling the holes with a herbicide.  The picture below shows what happens when this is done.  The crown of the tree falls off.

It appears that one of the side effect of removing all the rats was an increase in coconut seedlings since the rats were eating some of the coconuts.