You all may be wondering that this thing has never happened ,But in reality this is a major case study taught in all Environment courses.
But this is a historic incident. Story is about a place called Sarawak,Borneo (Malaysia).
In 1950s there was a severe outbreak of malaria in this part of world. People were dying because of this deadly disease. World Health organization came with a plan to rescue people from this deadly disease. They started spraying a chemical, DDT in all this area to kill and curb population of Mosquitoes. As a result of this mosquitoes died and cases of malaria became lesser and lesser with time. But every such experiment with our natural habitat often leads to a surprise.
So What was the surprise or a side effect this time:-
1. Roofs of Homes started falling on people. This happened because whole species of a parasitic wasp was killed due to DDT. This wasp used to eat caterpillar and as predator died, Population of caterpillar increased exorbitantly. These thatch-eating caterpillars ate all the woods in the roof and made them fall.
2.This side effect was more dangerous than first one. Due to presence of DDT in food chain ,Cats of the region started dying. As a result, population of rats started increasing very fast. People were just saved from Malaria and Now they were on the verge to be killed by more deadly disease called Plague.
As a result of all this plague actually broke out. People again started dying in more numbers than they were dying due to malaria.
Situation was critical and again WHO had to devise a plan to check this outbreak.
This is where story of flying cats and Operation “cat-drop” comes in to picture. WHO with the help of Royal Air force and US parachuted 14000 cats in Borneo to replenish cat population.
Cats flew from aircraft to Land with the help of Parachute to solve this huge human crisis in this part of the world.Cats in the end controlled population of rats and in the end save human lives from perishing.
Sometimes solutions to a problem create more problems and we have to come up with a weird idea like this to control the situation.
