According to the ministry, 30 mongooses were introduced to Amami-Oshima in 1979 to exterminate the habu snake, a poisonous pit viper. A mongoose and a habu snake face down each other. There was a ...

About 30 of the venom-resistant predators were released on Amami Oshima, a Unesco World Heritage site, in the late 1970s to keep down the population of habu, a pit viper whose bite can be deadly ...