Abstract
In many cases, biodiversity managers have learned the hard way that eliminating an invasive alien species can have unexpected, counter-intuitive and harmful chain effects. This surprise effect is difficult to study without taking great risks for local species, which can be heavily impacted by these chain reactions. In this lecture, we'll show how our 20-year study of a desert island invaded by rats saved several seabird populations. So we went to one of the world's most isolated islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to study this surprise effect; an island aptly named Surprise Island... And we did indeed come across a few surprises.
