A PLAN to reintroduce Indo-Pacific sea snakes onto islands where they are extinct may have to be scrapped 鈥� because they keep swimming home.
Hunting the yellow-lipped sea krait (Laticauda colubrina) for its leather has depleted populations in both the Philippines and Japan, leading to proposals to bring in snakes from other islands.
To see if this would work, Sohan Shetty of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore set up camp on uninhabited Mabualau island in Fiji so he could compare snake populations there and on Toberua, a resort island 5.3 kilometres away. The snakes, which can be up to 1.5 metres long, normally travel out to feed in the shallow water between the two islands.
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Snakes from both islands were caught and marked, and then released from Mabualau. Some 530 snakes were recaptured a year later, and all of them had swum back to their original homes (Conservation Biology, vol 16, p 1422). 鈥淲e have to focus conservation efforts on existing populations,鈥� says Shetty.