The World's Fair

It's ironic but having just answered a scienceblogger question about preservation, I'm aware of a personal predicament that addresses some of the same ideals. Namely, I've got a critter in my backyard. This is what I saw on my lawn this morning:

This isn't so surprising in itself, since we live next to a farm. Lots of other fauna inhabit around and about our surroundings. But see, these are mole hills and they are wrecking my lawn. And short of doing some targeted gene therapy to coerse them into prefering my neighbour's habitat, I'm a bit stuck about what to do.

Googling mole, of course, leads to the definition of mole in the following context:

"A mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 12 grams of carbon 12, where the carbon 12 atoms are unbound, at rest and in their ground state. The number of atoms in 12 grams (or, 0.012 kilograms) of carbon 12 is known as Avogadro's number. The currently accepted value is 6.022 1415(10) × 10²³ mol^-1"

If you read on, you'll find more interesting tidbits - especially the origin of the term itself. Wiki continues:

"The name mole (German Mol) is attributed to Wilhelm Ostwald who introduced the concept in the year 1902. It is an abbreviation for molecule (German Molekül), which is in turn derived from Latin moles "mass, massive structure". He used it to express the gram molecular weight of a substance."

Curiously enough, the mole (the animal that is) is a protected animal in Germany. None of this, of course, is helping me figure out a way to make them go away.