Palmerston Island, Cook Islands Photo: Cook Islands Tourism Corporation
A Cook Islands atoll is totally rat free after recent monitoring confirmed the success of an eradication programme.
Palmerston Island's executive officer Arthur Neale said locals now have peace of mind that the rats were gone.
He said households on the island - which is about 500km northwest of Rarotonga - were no longer concerned about rat infestations in households, and food security has improved, and he hoped bird numbers would increase.
"The rats would eat eggs of birds and also they would eat the turtles when they hatch," Neale said.
He said coconut, fruit trees and vegetable crops would also be eaten by rats.
The rat eradication operation took place on Palmerston in August and September in 2023. Recent monitoring with cameras and traps showed there was still no trace of rats.
Neale said it was a community effort to remove them.
"We had to put aside all other activities.
"We had a big clean-up and all that concentration was ensuring that we did everything right to move towards being successful and eradicating rats."
Visitors were also halted from entering Palmerston, he said.
"That goes to show how committed the community was in making sure that the project was a success."
Neale said the island's biosecurity monitoring was being strengthened to ensure they did not come back.
"This is where the challenge to strengthening our biosecurity monitoring going forward is - to ensure that we don't have any reintroduction of rats.
"Everything that's going to be landed on Palmerston will be checked to make sure that there's no rodents, and on shore we have bait stations that we set up each time we have a cargo ship coming in."
