evidence: Tromelin Island became a safe place for birds once the invasive mammals were eliminated [...] Rats had lived on the island, an overseas territory of France, for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the slave trade—wrecked there, says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, a French overseas region off the coast of Madagascar. Tromelin Island was probably home to at least eight different seabird species before the rodents arrived, including hundreds of thousands of frigatebirds, terns and boobies. But, as on hundreds of other islands around the world, the rats ate their way through those birds’ eggs, eventually decimating the populations. By 2005, when French authorities finally began eradicating the rodents, only two bird species were left: a few hundred pairs of masked and red-footed boobies. [...] On Tromelin Island, which is smaller than one square mile and uninhabited save for a small scientific research station, French authorities eradicated the rodents in a month using poisoned bait.