By Michael McCarthy
Gough Island - On a remote British island in the South Atlantic, one of the world's most important seabird breeding colonies, a natural history horror story is unfolding.
More than one million albatross, shearwater and petrel chicks, some goose-sized and weighing almost 10kg, are being eaten alive every year by mice.
The mice are descendants of the British house mouse, probably brought to isolated Gough Island, south of Tristan da Cunha, by ships in the 19th century but have grown to double the size of their ancestors.
'We think there are about 700 000 mice' They have also become carnivores and learned to attack big seabird chicks which, having evolved over millions of years on an island with no natural predators, do not know how to defend themselves.
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The mice attack at night, singly or in groups, gnawing into the chicks' bodies as they sit on the nest, and eventually killing them through blood loss or destruction of vital organs.
The scale of the killing has astonished the ornithologists who discovered it.
It is thought that it might eventually drive some of the 22 species of birds which breed on Gough to extinction.
Now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has been awarded a grant of more than £60 000 by the UK government's Overseas Territories Environment Programme to fund additional research on the Gough Island mice and a feasibility study of how best to deal with them.
'This species is one of the most worrying' The slaughter was first uncovered by RSPB research biologist Richard Cuthbert and his colleague Erica Sommer from Cape Town University when they spent a year working on Gough in 2000-2001.
It has since been confirmed with dramatic video footage of the attacks by Ross Wanless, a PhD student from the University of Cape Town's Percy Fitzpatrick Institute, and his colleague Andrea Angel.
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