Minnesota · 1877
A bounty by the bushel
After four summers of Rocky Mountain locust swarms, a native pest that was devouring the state’s crops, Minnesota’s legislature paid bounties for grasshoppers and their eggs: a dollar a bushel for grasshoppers caught before May 25, falling to 20 cents by summer, and 50 cents a gallon for eggs. Township officials measured each catch and destroyed it, and farmers dragged tar-coated “hopper dozers” across their fields. The swarms left that summer on their own, but the bounty is one of the earliest examples of a state paying ordinary people for the amount of a pest they removed.
Source: Minnesota History, 1958; MNopedia
Louisiana · since 2002
Paid by the tail
Nutria, large South American rodents, eat marsh plants down to the roots and speed the loss of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. Since 2002 the state’s Coastwide Nutria Control Program has paid registered hunters and trappers for every nutria tail they turn in, now $6 a tail. Participants remove roughly 170,000 to 450,000 nutria a season, and the state reports that marsh damage from nutria has fallen by more than 90 percent.
Source: Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
Florida · since 2017
Paid by the hour and by the foot
The South Florida Water Management District and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission pay contractors to remove invasive Burmese pythons from the Everglades. District contractors earn an hourly wage of $14 to $30 depending on the area, plus $50 for each python up to four feet, $25 for each additional foot, and $200 for each verified active nest. By spring 2025, contractors in the two programs had removed more than 11,000 pythons.
Source: SFWMD; Florida FWC
Japan · 1993–2024
An island cleared
About 30 mongooses were released on Amami-Ōshima in 1979 to control venomous habu snakes. They preyed on the island’s rare native wildlife instead and grew to about 10,000. Paying trappers for each mongoose, up to ¥5,000 by 2004, cut their numbers. From 2005 the Ministry of the Environment employed a full-time professional team, the Amami Mongoose Busters, using more than 30,000 traps, cameras, and detection dogs. More than 32,000 mongooses were removed, the last in 2018, and in 2024 Japan declared the island mongoose-free. Native species such as the Amami rabbit are recovering.
Source: Japan Ministry of the Environment
