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BySethBorenstein The Associated Press WASHINGTON Arobotzaps and vacuums up venomous lionfish in Bermuda. A he- licopter pelts Guam's trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boatwithgiantwinglikenets stunsandcatchesAsiancarp in the U.S. Midwest. In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, the weird and wired wins. "Crittersaresmart—they survive," said biologist Rob "Goose"Gosnell,headofU.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services in Guam, where brown tree snakes have gobbled up nearly all the native birds. "Trying to outsmartthemishardtodo." Invasivespeciesareplants and animals that thrive in areas where they don't nat- urally live, usually brought there by humans, either ac- cidentally or intentionally. Sometimes, with no natural predators, they multiply and take over, crowding out and at times killing native spe- cies. Now, new technology is being combined with the old methods — weed pull- ing, trapping and pesticides. Findingnewweaponsiscru- cial because invasive species are costly — $314 billion per year in damages in just the United States, United King- dom,Australia,SouthAfrica, IndiaandBrazil.It'salsoone of the leading causes of ex- tinction on islands, such as Guam, according to Piero Genovesi, an Italian scien- tist who chairs the invasive species task force for an in- ternational organization . "Wehavetotallynewtools that were just unthinkable a fewyearsago,"Genovesisaid. Case in point: There are companies that now market traps for wild pigs that are triggered by cellphones. "There's enough activity that there's starting to be an industry," said University of California, Santa Cruz re- search biologist Bernie Ter- shy. Lionfish A new underwater ro- bot is targeting the stun- ning but dangerous lion- fish, which has spread over the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and up the U.S. East Coast as far north as New York's Long Island, with its venomous spines that are dangerous to touch. With no natural predator in the Atlantic, the vora- cious aquarium fish devour large amounts of other fish including key commercial fish species such as snap- per and grouper. The robot is the creation of Colin An- gle, chief executive officer of IRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Along with his wife, Erika, and colleagues, he created a new nonprofit to turn au- tomation into environmen- tal tools. The robot, called Guard- ian LF1, uses what Angle says is a gentle shock to im- mobilize the lionfish before they are sucked alive into a tube. In its first public out- ing this month, the robot caught 15 lionfish during two days of testing in Ber- muda. Top chefs competed in a cook-off of the cap- tured lionfish. Lionfish go for nearly $10 a pound and Angle is hoping to get the priceoftherobotdownfrom tens of thousands of dollars to about $500. "What'snext?"Anglesaid. "Ourambitionismuchlarger than lionfish." Brown tree snakes A few decades ago, native birds started disappearing from the Pacific island of Guam, baffling scientists until they found that non- native brown tree snakes were eating all the birds and their eggs. The snakes, which live in the trees, had no natural enemies and just trapping them wasn't working, Gosnell said. The snakes did prove to have one enemy: the painkiller acetaminophen, a generic form of Tylenol. So biologists came up with a plan : Use a pain- killer pill glued to dead fetal mice as bait. The mice are put in tubes, and dropped by helicopter in batches of 3,000. The mice pop out, and the whole contrap- tion dangles in the trees. It's still experimental but it will soon go to more regu- lar use. There is one prob- lem. Using dead fetal mice as bait is expensive and they have to be kept cold. But biologists are working on a solution: mouse butter. A new bait mixture smells like mice to snakes, but mi- nus the expense and logis- tical problems. Asian carp U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials are using souped- up old technology to catch Asian carp, a fish that's taken over rivers and lakes in the Midwest. They use a specialized boat — the Magna Carpa — with giant winglike nets that essen- tially uses electric current as an underwater taser to stun the fish, said biologist Emily Pherigo. At higher doses, the fish are killed and float to the surface. In just five minutes, they can collect 500 fish, and later turn them into fertilizer. Using electro-fishing was written about as a possi- ble conservation technique back in 1933, said biologist Wyatt Doyle. Wild goats On the Galapagos is- lands, wild goats were a major problem. In less than five years, scientists wiped out tens of thousands with sterile "Mata Hari" females. Biologist Karl Campbell of the nonprofit Island Con- servation introduced spe- cialized female goats that researchers sterilized and chemically altered into a permanent state of heat, to lure the male goats into fruitless goat sex. Santiago Island, once home to 80,000 goats, is now goat free and larger Isabella Island is get- ting close, he said. And now, Campbell and others are going one step further: Tinkering with the genes of mosquitoes and mice to make them sterile or only have male offspring . That would eventually cause a species to die off on an island because of lack of females to mate with. There are worries about regulat- ing and controlling this technology, along with ac- tually being able to get it done, so it is years away, Campbell said. SCIENCE Robots, tasers join battle against invasive species DR.PHILIPPEROUJA—ROBOTSINSERVICEOFTHEENVIRONMENT This artist photo was taken the first day a new robot was used to hunt dangerous and invasive lionfish in Bermuda. It stuns lionfish with an electric current and then the fish is vacuumed into a container alive and it can later be sold for food. By Deb Riechmann The Associated Press WASHINGTON The Na- tional Security Agency said Friday it will no longer col- lect certain communica- tions moving on the inter- net simply because they mention a foreign intelli- gence target, in a move ap- plauded by privacy advo- cates. The agency said it will now limit such collection to internet communications sent directly to or from a foreign target. It won't per- mit intelligence officials to collect emails, texts and other communications be- tween two people who are not targets of surveillance — but who mention a tar- get by name. The changes, first re- ported by The New York Times, are designed to re- duce the chances of sweep- ing up communications of U.S. citizens or others in a way that some critics charged was overly broad. Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Sur- veillance Act, U.S. intelli- gence agencies can conduct surveillance on only specific foreign targets outside the United States. The NSA said an in-house review of Section 702 activ- ities showed several "inad- vertent compliance lapses." It said such incidents were properly reported to Con- gress and the federal court overseeing foreign intelli- gence surveillance activi- ties. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden or Oregon, a leading NSA critic, said the practice of collecting information for mentioning a target was a "magnet for abuse." "This is something I've been working to get rid of for years and years," Wyden told The Associated Press in an interview Friday. Wyden commended the NSA for recognizing the problem and said he would work to make the changes part of law. Section 702 is set to expire at the end of this year and lawmakers are weighing its reauthori- zation. Concern over the Amer- icans' communications re- newed this year as the Trump administration ac- cused the intelligence com- munity of improperly re- vealing the names of Amer- icans that came up through incidental collections. In February, President Donald Trump fired his na- tional security adviser, Mi- chael Flynn, after saying he lied about phone conversa- tions with a Russian diplo- mat. But Trump accused Susan Rice, former Presi- dent Barack Obama's secu- rity adviser, of illegally "un- masking" Flynn's identity before details of the con- versations were leaked to the press. INTELLIGENCE NS A to s to p co ll ec ti ng s om e in te rn et c om mu ni ca ti on s 728MainStreet Red Bluff, CA 96080 Support our classrooms, keep kids reading. 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