5 Doomed Quests to Control the Earth
Sometimes, our quests to tame the land work out great. Planting food, for example, turned out to be an excellent improvement over nibbling random berries and is why, today, we have Fritos. Domesticating wolves was also a great idea. It’s why, today, you have a pet dog — who is coincidentally also named Fritos.
Other times? The quest doesn’t quite succeed.
Florida’s Bat Tower
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Bats are marvelous creatures. They’re like kittens with wings, and if you’re scared of them, that’s just an irrational fear of vampires. Best of all, bats kill mosquitos. That’s why, in 1929, Sugarloaf Key in Florida decided to build a tower that would attract and house 100,000 bats, to end the island’s insect problem. If that sounds like a batshit plan to you, you’re correct: They also hoped to use the tower to collect bat guano, which they could sell.
Building the tower was easy enough, if expensive. Trickier was attracting the bats. The answer came from Texas bat expert Charles Campbell, who put together a special bait of his own invention. No one is entirely sure of its ingredients, but rumor said that it mixed bat guano with mashed-up bat vaginas. The process of attracting the bats involved placing a box of bait into a receptacle, pouring in water and then fleeing to get away from the smell.
The very first day they set up the tower to attract its flying residents, a hurricane hit the island. It swept away all the bait. Now, it was time to get Campbell on the line for a resupply, but the guy had died and had taken his bait recipe to the grave with him.
For nearly a century, the bat tower remained there on Sugarloaf Key, without a single bat living in it. Then, in 2017, another hurricane came by, and this one was strong enough to smash the tower into splinters.
The Dunes That Slipped Away
A storm also ended this next coastal project. This one happened in the town of Salisbury, Massachusetts, where storms always risk damaging homes. So, residents came up with protective measure: dunes. They’d create their own artificial sand dunes, a nice buffer between houses and the sea.
A quick collection among residents produced $565,000, which was enough to buy 15,000 tons of sand. They trucked the stuff in and created the dunes as planned. Three days later, a storm came in, and the tide washed the sand away.
The storm didn’t wash the houses away, so you can say the dunes did their job. Still, as the group that raised the money for the dunes put it, “Everybody’s upset,” and no one thought trying the same thing again was a great idea. A more permanent solution for residents might involve moving somewhere that doesn’t directly face oncoming storms, but life in Salisbury has its advantages. The views are marvelous.
Japan’s Vengeful Crows
Power lines often run overhead, which offers a lot of problems versus sticking them underground. Overhead is easy to construct and easy to repair but is vulnerable to various threats, including mylar balloons and carefully aimed shoes. Overhead wires can also take damage from bird nests. In 2008, the city of Kagoshima in Japan realized that crows were responsible for the city’s blackouts.
So, the electric company created a Crow Patrol, which scoured the skyline with binoculars and then swept in to destroy nests. As for the birds themselves, the city targeted them by laying out garbage bags full of poisoned meat. Keep in mind, crows aren’t little pests the size of pigeons. They have a wingspan of three feet, and they terrorize children (with their voluminous droppings).
Following the anti-crow operations, the city attempted a new census and discovered that there were now even more crow nests than before. The crows were still building, and they were even building dummy nests they didn’t use, to waylay members of the Crow Patrol. If that sounds like people attributing human-like reasoning to animals, it’s not. It’s people attributing crow-like reasoning to crows.
Crows are wily creatures and will ultimately defeat us all.
The Mission to Blow Up the Sky
We’ve been spending a great many generations trying to figure how to make it rain. Rain dances often seem to be effective, but we might just be imagining their effects. Seeding clouds with silver iodide also sometimes seems to help, but here as well, we aren’t always so sure.
In 1891, the thirsty people of Texas had a new plan. Stories often recorded rain breaking out over battlefields, so it’s only logical to assume that the events of battle somehow precipitate those exact weather events. A team assembled, consisting of a weather man, a patent clerk, a chemist and some guy named John. Together, they attached 156 pounds of explosives to kites and flew them into the sky to unleash the waterworks.
Following the explosions, lightning and thunder really did erupt. And some rain fell. Very little rain, but some. Based on what we know now of how rain works, this had nothing to do with the explosions, but the men had smartly scheduled their experiment on a day when rain seemed likely regardless.
Later, they repeated the experiment, this time with half a ton of explosives. This time, it really did rain — on the other side of town, somewhere not impacted by the blasts. So, dynamite offered some limited promise. Not quite as much as rain dances, but some.
The Cats of Macquarie Island
When the British came to Macquarie Island, south of New Zealand, in 1810, they found the place to be a great source of penguins, which they could kill for their valuable penguin oil. But they also found a problem: Mice seemed to be scampering around, and that’s not convenient for anyone. Thus, they released a bunch of cats to eat the mice. Also, they released rabbits, which could breed and become a long-term food source.
A century went by, and these animals multiplied, completely killing off several species of birds and also wiping out most of the island’s vegetation. Now, scientists proposed a perfect solution. They would release a virus to target the rabbits. To spread this virus, they would release the European rabbit flea. The nicest thing we can say about this plan is that it didn’t lead to the virus mutating and also wiping out all of humanity. However, it also didn’t wipe out the rabbits, whose numbers fell for a bit and then rebounded.
The cats remained a problem as well, and with no convenient cat-seeking virus, scientists reached for the next thing: guns. A kill squad went through the island and killed every cat. That solved the cat problem, but the drop in competition fostered even more rabbits. The bunnies nibbled so much on what remining plants held the island together that they caused a landslide, which killed off a penguin colony.
The story of Macquarie Island is 200 years of failure. But things seem to have gotten a bit better after that. A new quest to kill every single cat, rabbit and mouse on the island appears to have succeeded. The secret weapon this time? Teams of dogs, trained to hunt those targets.
Like we said, quests to control the Earth do occasionally succeed, and these ones usually involve dogs.
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