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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."
Ecosystems adapt. Their ecosystem has changed to accomidate the rats. Now removing them will cause the ecosystem to have to change back. It just sounds kind of dumb.
I know this is nit-picking, but the ecosystem will never "change back".
That's the neat thing about ecosystems. They evolve.
I hear people talking about changing things back all the time, mostly when discussing societal ills, and it has always disturbed me. Change is something you can't reverse. You may like the past better than the present, but you can never go back.
Just adapt and deal with it.
and once again prepare for the onslaught of ignorance and total misunderstanding of ecology from the technophiles in the /. crowd...
yes ecosystems change, and yes technology can be a great and wonderful thing, but what most of the people around here seem to forget is that:
1.) these are not natural changes, they are human induced.
2.) and while it is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to restore the ecosystem to its former glory, to attempt some amount of rehabilitation of the ecosystem and its constituent species is a good thing. maybe no person will ever benefit from it, but ya know what - just because it is not for human benefit doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
3.) and in conclusion, while some will demand that these species either adapt or go extinct, here's a news flash - there are few species on this planet that are able to adapt to the mass changes that we have made to the environment. while the cockroaches, pigeons, and rats all seem to do fine co-existing with humans (and i think it's no surprise that these are all species that survive off of refuse, something we seem to produce an ample supply of), there are many more that have not been able to and that continue to go extinct every day.
until we as a species take a step back and develop a healthy skepticism of our actions and our technology (newsflash: all technology is not good, and don't give me the weak "it's just a tool" line - tools are designed for specific purposes, not some benign you can do whatever you want with it purpose), we will continue to kill off more species, we will continue to swallow up more of the world's resources until the only species left to go over...is us.
will the last one out please turn out the lights...
fuck you.
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 %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
NZ has a high proportion of ground nesting birds because, with the exception of bats, it has no native mammals.
Rats (and other species introduced into NZ such as possums) eat the eggs of these birds. They are a clear cause of the decline in numbers of such wonderful birds as the kiwis and the kakapo.
It really isn't *rocket surgery* to realise that if you remove the predators you will do something to save the bird populations.
Your points:
1) we don't really have enough information to perfectly reproduce the former system. Instead all we're doing is trying to cut out the obvious variable of a single human introduced species. Does killing all the rats make everything go back to normal?
No, killing all the rats does not make everything go back to normal: Killing all the rats preserves the remaining endangered bird species.
2) Even if we did know exactly what changes were made, it's doubtful that we could exert a level of control over the ecosystem to return all pieces to pre-human conditions. It's far more likely that we'll simply create further imbalance. What about the species which are already extinct, how do you reintroduce them?
Well, no, you can't re-introduce extinct species (Jurassic Park scenario excepted).
Obviously.
But no-one is talking about putting everything back *exactly* to how it was before the introduction of rats (which was done by Europeans in the 18th C, and therefore not in NZ's pre-human times); all we can do is stop the damage going any further and slam on the brakes now.
Sure, we might not "really have enough information" to sort things out properly, but we can make a start with the obvious stuff, can't we? So let;s not get bogged down with the fuzzy Gaia rubbish about balance and life etc when valuable DNA is going up the chimney.
If anyone wants to help NZ wildlife directly, check out Possum Fur Nipple Warmers - products made from the skins on NZ's wildlife enemy #1!
All things in moderation; including moderation