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

Re:What about the poison?

[E-prospero]

Depends on what they used as a poison. The interesting thing about places like Australia and New Zealand is that we have lots of plants that have naturally occurring toxins to which native animals are immune.

For example; In Western Australia, a large number of plants produce a substance called 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) in their leaves, berries, etc. Native animals, after millenia of exposure to this toxin, are immune to its effects - they munch away on it happily.

However - if you feed 1080 to a cat/fox/other introduced feral mammal, they drop dead real fast. As a result, 1080 is used extensively in feral animal control programs throughout Australia and New Zealand.

1080 is naturally occurring, biodegradable and therefore non-accumulative, so it has minimal long term effect on the native environment, other than the irradication of introduced animals and a restoration of the native population.

If you want more info, there is a really good (PDF) document from the Western Australian Agriculture department here.

Russ %-)