by Janet A. Ginsburg

Icarus would be astonished. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), two billion people took to the skies last year. On any given day, more than five million of us are up in the air, mindlessly defying gravity, sailing through the clouds. And we are not alone…

UPSTAIRS

A few weeks ago, a Kansas City television station aired video of a mouse infestation aboard an American Airlines jet. Mice had nibbled their way through a wire and insulation feast, nested in air vents, scampered under seats, partied in overhead storage bins, and left a dusting of fecal confetti pretty much everywhere. Dead mice were reportedly discovered in oxygen masks -- just the sort of “drop down” surprise guaranteed to make any emergency that much more memorable.

The Boeing 767 had logged tens of thousands of miles flying between New York and Los Angeles between the time the problem was first reported in April to when it was cleaned up in May. Chances are you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who was on that plane.

According to the maintenance employee who supplied the footage, exterminators estimated that there could have been as many as 1,000 mice on board, although the airline reported finding just 17 alive (no word on how many dead). AA insisted there was never any danger -- and the Federal Aviation Administration agreed. Reports of rodent infestations are required only if there's a mechanical problem, not merely the threat of one. So no big deal.

Well, maybe. But if that 767 had been a restaurant, the Health Department surely would have shut it down.

News of the Mouse Plane scurried across the internet, prompting an outpouring of “You won’t believe what happened to me!” stories. More mice on planes. A few rats on planes. The occasional escaped pet guinea pig. Swarms of mosquitos. Bed bugs. And yes, snakes on planes, too.

But it is the invisible stowaways on the stowaways that can cause the biggest “eek!” The wonder isn't that things like West Nile virus happen, but that they don’t happen more often. Or maybe they do, but with so many different diseases that take four or five days to incubate, causing vague "flu-like symptoms,” who can tell?

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DOWNSTAIRS

The skinks, about a thousand in the shipment, squirmed inside thin cotton sacks thumb-tacked to the sides of a wooden crate. Mike, an inspector with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) and my guide for a behind-the-scenes look at LAX, had pried the box open with a hammer and wedge and we peered inside. The elegantly petite lizards -- this lot from Egypt -- wholesale for 50 cents to a dollar each and retail for anywhere from $25 to $100-plus. Mike took one out. It stared in its impenetrable reptilian way into the cavernous expanse of the airport warehouse. Welcome to America.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) keeps tabs on the transport of farm animals (pigs fly, yes, though not nearly as often as day-old chicks, which are boxed and shipped by the billions from hatcheries around the world, a "migration" that dwarfs anything seen in Nature). But wildlife imports are USFWS' turf. Their mission: to confiscate animals on the CITES list of endangered species and root out smugglers, which is an increasingly difficult task. Staffing levels have been stagnant for years, while the workload has grown exponentially. The dozen or so inspectors at LAX routinely put in 60-hour weeks, but never seem to quite catch up.

“You’ve got inspectors carrying 24-hour pagers. They worked all day and then they worked some overtime at night. And then they get a page from Customs at 11:30 at night. Something crawled out of somebody’s suitcase at the passenger terminal. If I get a phone call at home after 11 o’clock, it’s generally Customs. Almost always.”

Most of the traffic at LAX involves the tropical fish trade, though a little bit of just about everything wanders in the door - except for venomous reptiles, which are illegal in California, so fly into Miami or Houston instead. Shippers favor airports in places where temperatures stay above freezing because it improves the odds of survival.* Including the survival of the occasional runaway like the monitor lizard that lived in the grass near an LAX runway for years. The baby lizard, perhaps sensing its illegal status, darted from its crate and dashed out an open dock door to find Eden in the grass near a runway in the shadow of a high-rise airport hotel. By the time it finally reemerged, it was a four-foot monster, a mini-Godzilla ready to take on Hollywood.

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I watched Mike cut open countless boxes of “live rock,” dead coral used as reef-starter for aquaria. Peering closely into a plastic bag, I could just begin to make out tiny anemones, crabs and plants in the cloudy water. There were pallets and pallets of the stuff, mostly from Fiji. I began to wonder whether Fiji itself wasn’t being shipped here piece by piece, like the Statue of Liberty, for later reassembly.

It is anybody's guess what else might have been in the water. When cholera broke out in South America a few years back, Mike asked around to see whether anyone was interested in testing the water from a large shipment of South American freshwater fish. No one had the time or staff.

A far more pressing problem is figuring out what to do with an endless caravan of confiscated creatures, all of which need to be fed and housed. Zoos can only take in so many. And the options for less charismatic animals, such as the tank-ful of baby snakehead fish (the very species that that caused such a fright when one showed up in a Maryland lake a few years ago) are limited. Still, in a rare lemonade-from-lemons twist, tons upon tons of seized CITES-protected coral have helped build crowd-pleasing reef exhibits in public aquaria from Seattle to Baltimore. Ironically, now that corals in the wild are dying off at record rates from global warming and disease, these smuggled survivors have become that much more precious.

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The skinks passed inspection. We tucked them back into their sack and nailed the crates shut. The dealer, a friendly, folksy middle-aged woman, came by toward the end of the day in an unmarked white truck. She quickly loaded up and drove off into the anonymity of an L.A. rush hour. The skinks were on the move once more…

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* Snakes, which are cold-blooded, usually come from places warmer than planes, so are generally too

sluggish and shocked in their burlap shipping bags to present the kind of fang-bearing dramatic threat

seen in the movie.