This dissertation argues eighteenth-century Anglophone nature writers theorized unruly animal subjects as colonial antagonists. In the early Caribbean, so-called “pests” formed their own networks – manifesting alternative human-animal-plant relations across the plantation’s borders – and thwarted attempts to impose epistemological and social order on the islands. Naturalists thus increasingly relied on the methods of Afro-Caribbeans who had a better grasp of the landscape. This expertise was necessarily tied to their survival and resistance to enslavement, and thus Afro-Caribbean knowledges regularly frustrated planter efforts to render the environment productive, making them hostile to the development of colonial science. Bridging the temporal and geographical gaps between studies on pests by Lucinda Cole and Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, this dissertation suggests vermin narratives in the early Caribbean reveal how colonizers’ efforts to separate a cultivated plantation space from torrid ecologies were fractious. This dissertation analyzes human-nonhuman enmeshments through case studies on four pests – rats, insects, snakes, and vultures – to chart the fraught ideological formation of racial distinctions, European theories of the body, and imperial narratives about civilizational progress. Its central theoretical concept, “noxious life,” underscores how island life’s ability to be poisonous and fecund disrupted the emergent colonial biopolitical regime.