The setup is fairly simple. A dead mouse is stuffed with acetaminophen and attached to a small piece of cardboard and streamer. This tiny parachute is then dropped from a helicopter and gets entangled in the trees. By keeping the mice up in the trees rather than on the forest floor, scientists are able to get the poison directly to the tree snakes, who will never realize that their new Amazon mice delivery service is actually a lethal trap.

U.S. Dept. of Agriculture

U.S. Dept. of Agriculture*Play for full effect*

While the teeny paratroopers won't eradicate the snakes entirely, they have been helpful in keeping the population under control. Authorities are also using snake traps, snake-sniffing dogs, and snake hunters to reduce the number of snakes slithering around the island. Still, we salute the service and sacrifice made by American's ittiest troops.

There was talk of burying it, burning it, or cutting it up, but ultimately, a far more respectful and elegant solution was offered: shoving dynamite in the corpse's mouth and blowing it to kingdom come. Engineers figured, "Pieces of blubber [would] scatter into the water, [and] what was left would be cleaned up by seagulls and crabs." And you know it's a good plan when you're counting on crabs to do all the heavy lifting for you.

Of course, because the city would be using live explosives on public ground, the event attracted a lot of onlookers. Watching a whale explode was a lot more entertaining than wearing jeans and listening to Led Zeppelin, or whatever it was '70s folk did for fun. For safety's sake, bystanders were told to stay at least a quarter of a mile away from the blast zone. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a drastic underestimation, and everyone and everything within a half mile or so got showered with rank whale.

Discovery ChannelWe’re not taking harmless little flecks of whale, either.

Almost miraculously, no one got hurt by the literal ton of corpse shrapnel that shot through the sky. A piece of blubber the size of a coffee table flattened a car, while people and other vehicles were pelted with smaller bits. "Blubber is so dense that a piece as big as the tip of your finger can be like a bullet and kill you," an onsite reporter later admitted, meaning the city did the marine biology equivalent of throwing a grenade into an ammo depot and inviting everyone to come and watch.

But despite the massive explosion, destroyed cars, and blubber-encrusted bystanders, the bulk of the carcass didn't even budge. Ultimately, crews buried the remaining chunks of whale, an option they probably should have gone with from the start.

Scientists designated a massive dump zone within the park, an area where the soil was too depleted for the tropical forest to rebound naturally. One thousand truckloads and some 12,000 metric tons of orange peels later, the result was a rather orange but very pleasant-smelling field.

Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs“If the experiment fails, we’re at least all set to make a lot of Old Fashioneds.”

However, a jealous rival fruit company decided that all this beneficial waste management was standing in the way of something much more important: greed. Ticofrut filed a lawsuit, alleging that the peels had not only "defiled a national park," but also created an unfair market advantage for one of its competitors. After a successful smear campaign, the Supreme Court ordered the project to be shut down. The ecologists were forced off the land, and Del Oro had to go back to dumping their waste elsewhere. But the orange peels remained, and nature became unstoppable.

Tim TreuerThat’s the orange-treated side on the right. You know, the part with all the plants.

In 2013, after 15 years of obscurity, a grad student from Princeton stumbled upon the lost orange peel dump as a possible research venue. When researchers finally arrived at the site, they found it unrecognizable. Compared to untreated control fields, they found the orange peel areas had "Richer soil, more tree biomass, greater tree-species richness, and greater forest canopy closure." Given the "stunning" difference between the fertilized and unfertilized areas, they are hoping their findings will convince other nations to accept this more "appealing" (sorry) method of recycling.

They figured they could fix their beaver imbalance by relocating 76 beavers to remote, underpopulated areas, but they hit a bit of a snag. The underpopulated areas in question were so rural that they were simply inaccessible by road. They tried getting the beavers there by horse and mule, but it turned out that neither animal was willing to travel the wild with a bunch of bucktoothed maniacs strapped to their backs.

Idaho Fish and Game Department They may look like an animal designed by Walt Disney, but don’t be fooled. Beavers don’t play.

But Idaho Fish and Game had two things no other governmental departments had: a lack of common sense and a surplus of parachutes from World War II. A very smart man named Elmo Heter designed a special wooden box that would hold a beaver while it was sailing through the air and then open when it hit the ground.

Idaho Fish and Game DepartmentOtherwise, they'd just be making a bunch of tiny coffins.

In Bangalore, India, traffic is so notoriously bad that it's not unusual for people to up and drive the wrong way. Realizing that no good will come of this, police now have fake cops posted at three busy intersections. As the police commissioner states: "The tendency among road users is that whenever they see there is no traffic policemen at any stretch of the road, they try to violate traffic rules." So now, these cardboard prints of mustachioed Bangalore cops take the beats no one else will, staring angrily into traffic and signaling that any wrong-way driver should turn the hell around.

Meanwhile, in Fife, Scotland, their first Scottish-Arborean police officer has already become a bit of a celebrity. "Pop-up Bob" patrols streets with his radar gun in an attempt to deter speeding. He moves to a new location every hour, because even cardboard people need a change of scenery every now and then.

The ScotsmanThough it seems like the bigger story is a small town that would rather prevent speeding than ticket it.

But the most realistic cardboard cop has to be the one guarding a train station in Boston. That's because it's the cardboard twin of a real beat cop, Officer David Silen. Since putting up a cutout of this Transit Police officer, the number of monthly bicycle thefts at Alewife Station has decreased from five to one. It goes to show that even a bit of thick paper with a badge painted on is enough for most punks to ask themselves how lucky they are.

WBZ-TVBike thefts are down, but sexual selfies with the cutout remain a constant issue.

How did they do it? Some smartypants realized that while they had no telephone wire, they had plenty of barbed wire to go around -- around their fields, to be specific. Turns out, all metal wire is pretty much the same for these purposes, and the stuff used to keep people at a distance could also keep them connected. To join these networks, all you had to do was buy a phone from Sears Roebuck and clip it to your fence, as long as you didn't mind having all your cows listening in on your conversations.

The Daily Herald"Unlimited texting if you add a mailbox."

The one major difference between the official networks and their barbed wire counterparts was that these pirate networks had no switchboard, so all the phones used the same line. So when these rural communities got connected, they did so with nothing but a prickling conscience to stop someone from listening in on a neighbor's calls. Ironic, really, given that barbed wire tends to be used to get rid of snoopers, not make it easier for them.