Antiguan Racer - Relationship With Humans

Relationship With Humans

In the centuries before the Europeans arrived in Antigua, the Antiguan Racers were numerous and widespread. The thick forest that covered the island teemed with lizards, the snakes' favored prey, and the racer had no natural predators to threaten them.

In the late 15th century, European settlers began to colonize and develop Antigua and Barbuda for huge plantations of sugar cane. The ships which brought slaves to the island also brought rats. Feasting on the sugar cane and, among other things, the eggs of the Antiguan Racer, the rat population rocketed. By the end of the 19th century, the island was overpopulated with rats.

The plantation owners, desperate to rid themselves of the rats, came up with a plan to introduce Asian mongooses to kill the rats. However, they failed to realize that black rats (Rattus rattus) are mainly nocturnal, while the mongooses prefer to hunt during the day. Instead of eating the rats, the mongooses instead ate the native birds, frogs and Antiguan Racers. Within sixty years, the snake had vanished completely from Antigua and most of its offshore islands and many believed that it had become extinct.

However, a few Antiguan Racers survived on a tiny mongoose-free island known Great Bird Island. In the early 1990s, a local naturalist from the Island Resources Foundation met a zoologist from Fauna & Flora International. Together, they visited Great Bird Island and rediscovered the snake. However, there were only 50 snakes alive in 1995.

Conservation work quickly got underway with surveys of the snake's biology. In December 1995, rat poison was laid across Great Bird Island to eliminate the rats which were threatening the racers. The effort succeeded. In 1996, five adult racers were collected and sent to the Jersey Zoo for the first attempt at captive breeding. The female racers laid eleven eggs with five hatching, but proved to be difficult to keep in captivity due to their feeding habits and low resistance to diseases. Nine of the ten captive racers died because of the common snake mite.

However, the eradication of rats and mongooses on Great Bird Island led to a population explosion, with the number of racers on the island doubling in two years. However, 20% of the racers were underweight because of the lack of number of lizards to maintain the population levels. Efforts began to clean other offshore islands of Antigua of rats and mongooses to reintroduce the snake so that the population can continue to grow.

The Antiguan Racer is believed to be the world's most endangered snake. It is currently threatened by hurricanes, such as Hurricane Luis and Hurricane Georges, flooding, drought, and inbreeding due to low genetic diversity.