New Zealand Exterminates Rats

-brazil- writes "It's well-known that one of the worst things humans can do to a biosystem is to introduce new plants and animals that the native species are unprepared to compete with. The NZ government has been trying to reverse one such such ecological disaster in a project to exterminate rats from Campbell Island, where they were introduced by sailors 200 years ago, spread like wildfire and proceeded to severely decimate or outright eradicate many species of native seabirds. After massive deployment of rat poison two years ago, the island has now been declared a rat-free bird sanctuary, and some species that only survived in captivity will be re-introduced. Still, full recovery is estimated to take hundreds of years."

Comments

severely decimate decimate is an absolute

[DrSkwid]

severely decimate or outright eradicate

Decimate is to remove 1 in 10

The name comes from a punishment from the Roman army. One of the pinishments available to a commadning officer was that the men shoudl line up, every tenth man would be told to step forward. The rest of the unit were then ordered to beat these unfortunates to death.

One famous use for such a practice was during the hunt for Spartacus, Crassus punished his army using this method when the slave rebellion escaped.