The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) plans to drop vaccine-laden, peanut butter-covered M&M’s from drones as part of its plan to save the black-footed ferret from sylvatic plague-ridden prairie dogs.
Officials will release vaccine-laden M&M’s at the UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge in Montana to target prairie dogs with sylvatic plague, a flea-borne disease from rats, The Guardian reported Tuesday. The endangered black-footed ferret is the only native ferret to the U.S. and there are only about 300 left. The ferrets are highly dependent on a thriving prairie dog population, so as prairie dog numbers decline from disease, so do ferret numbers.
“We dropped the vaccine out of a bag while walking around, but that’s very hard to do over thousands of acres,” Randy Machett, an FWS biologist, told The Guardian. “So we are working with private contractors to develop equipment to drop the vaccine uniformly across an area, rather than one hog getting to eat a big pile of them.”
Machett says a “glorified gumball machine” is attached to the drone and drops the vaccine-coated chocolate candies at 30-foot intervals. The drone will also fire in multiple directions, so three vaccines can be fired at once.
“It is the fastest, cheapest way to distribute the vaccine,” Machett told The Guardian.
Machett says the prairie dogs love the candy treat and that a special dye was added that stains the animals’ whiskers so scientists know the bait is taken. Since the black-footed ferret numbers are so low, they can be vaccinated via injection, but prairie dogs numbers are too high for injections to be feasible.
Some of the animals were discovered in South Dakota in 1964 after they were thought extinct in the 1950s. Biologists then captured several ferrets for captive breeding to help declining numbers, but the last ferret in captivity died in 1979, which lead researchers to believe that ferrets were, again, extinct. Black-footed ferrets were found in Montana in 1984, which ultimately lead to the Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Program. The ferrets were re-introduced to the UL Bend National Wildlife Refuge in 1994.
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