Off the coast of Southern California, amid a literal sea of troubles—warming waters, microplastic pollution, overfishing—is a 96-square-mile conservation success story. Santa Cruz Island once teemed with feral pigs and invasive Argentine ants until the Nature Conservancy unleashed a coordinated campaign of eradication. That’s allowed the adorable island fox to bounce back from the brink of extinction.
The battle was won, but the war wasn’t over, because the Nature Conservancy now has to defend that territory from yet another invader: rats. The scourge of islands everywhere, rats get ashore and breed like crazy, devouring just about everything in their paths—native plant seeds, bird and reptile eggs, local people’s crops. (Urban
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