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Opossums Overrun Brooklyn, Fail To Eliminate Rats
__roo writes "In a bizarre case of life imitates the Simpsons, New York City officials introduced a population of opossums into Brooklyn parks and under the boardwalk at Coney Island, apparently convinced that the opossums would eat all of the rats in the borough and then conveniently die of starvation. Several years later, the opossums have not only failed to eliminate the rat epidemic from New York City, but they have thrived, turning into a sharp-toothed, foul-odored epidemic of their own."
Based on my experience, automobiles seem to work wonders on these things. Clearly, we just need to bring in more automobiles to New York.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just tell the hipsters in Brooklyn that it's totally ironic to wear live Opossums on their heads. Kill two birds with one stone.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Just bring in a colony of ferocious lions to eat the possums. When the lions become a problem, bring in gorillas to fight the lions. Then in winter the cold will kill the gorillas. Problem solved!
Did they learn nothing from the story of the old lady who swallowed a fly?
Poor thing. I hear she died.
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
Bring in alligators to eat the opossum, and then in the winter, they'll all freeze to death.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
We had to deal with a bold, insane, possibly rabid raccoon on the front porch last week. Believe me, it's scary when the wild animals decide they're not afraid of you at all.
We have these in Chicago; one died in my back yard. They're just like rats, but bigger. I can't believe anyone thought this was a good idea.
Life always find its way...
I'm not sure why they thought they would only eat rats, that makes no sense. Opossums eat pretty much anything. I mean they're not unlike just big rats themselves.
Really this sounds more like an urban legend than what really happened.
The Opossum's most effective predator is the Reticulated Gap-Toothed Yokel.
They're not liable to freeze to death, but they'll likely get killed off by wandering into traffic while looking up at them big tall buildings.
Seriously though, no one in their right mind down here would try to destroy a rat problem with a possum problem. Matter of fact, anyone that doesn't call them 'possum' doesn't really have any experience with the nasty things. The 'opossum' is about one of the nastiest animals I have ever had the displeasure of looking at. We get them in the garbage can every now and then... They get stuck and can't get out if there's not enough in the can for them to climb out. I usually just leave them there and let the trash man take care of them. I've poked at them a little bit and they just show their teeth and hiss. I've never seen them play dead. They're about the #2 roadkill item around here, after armadillo...
So New York, I hear that badgers eat possum... interested?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
This story is giving me back a google text ad for "Alabama Pest Control" Yes, it got the location right.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
That's a mighty nice soapbox you have there.
With a stick and some string, you'd have an even better possum trap.
I call the big one Bitey!
Snakes. Lots of snakes.
All the Google News stories use the New York Post's article as their source. The NYP's article is sensationalist and light on details.
Full disclosure: I don't mind the opossums, skunks, and raccoons wandering my Toronto neighbourhood.
Maybe I have the benefit of experience, having lived in the south and all, but WHO WOULD BE SO F#$%ING STUPID AS TO USE POSSUMS FOR PEST CONTROL?
The damn things are like the mammalian answer to cockroaches. If they didn't have typical mammalian susceptibility to radiation, odds on them among southerners would be 10:1, their favor against roaches to survive a nuclear holocaust by eating the remaining roaches and being the last species standing.
I just love it when morons like yourself get up on your soapboxes & say stupid shit.
Makes my day.
does quoting an entomologist's description of opossums seem odd to anyone else?
I'm curious if anyone knows of any success stories of using this strategy with large animals.
It definitely seems to work on smaller scales, like buying praying mantis eggs to control garden pests. But I'm not sure I've ever heard of a success involving anything much bigger than that.
HA HA!
I know this is Idle, but still.
Newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post.
Tabloids: New York Post, Washington Times.
If this is a real story, is there a real paper carrying it somewhere?
Sort of, here's a United Press International feed: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/09/19/Immigrant-opossums-adapt-to-Brooklyn/UPI-90141284911712/
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Anything can be solved with a BFG.
Their unspecialized biology, flexible diet and reproductive strategy make them successful colonizers and survivors in diverse locations and conditions.
If they had just read the first two paragraphs in wikipedia, they'd know possums don't just "die off" after there's no more rats.
Is it against city policy to simply throw down poison cheese into the gutters?
Should be one of that kind that could be natural enemy of rats or oppossums. And that way we give Australia the revenge chance for the rabbits or the frogs
Check out the comments on that New York Post article... I thought racism was over :(
As someone raised in Hawaii, I'm pretty shocked that people still think that introducing yet another new species into an ecosystem is going to solve any problems. I thought we all figured this out over 100 years ago?
I remember a line from "Cheers"
Norm: There's a dead possum in the stairwell... at least I hope it's a possum. I hate to think a rat could get that big...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Whenever I read stuff like this, I am reminded of the simple-mindedness of Space Nutters and other whackjobs of the same ilk that think we'll colonize Mars.
They really think we have the technology and knowledge to do so; but we don't even know how stuff works down here!
I do believe that integrated pest management techniques are a valid approach, and that we are going to have a lot of trial and error before we come up with safe and effective approaches to using one species to control another like that. So the part about it failing doesn't really annoy me (and I live in Brooklyn). The part that kind of offends me is that this decision was made by a Community Board, rather than by trained professionals in the NYC or NYS DEPs.
Have we not learned from Australia?
We've given Australia plague after plague after plague. From rabbits to buffalo and from camels to toads. And they didn't even keep any captive Jewish slaves. Introducing new species as a way of killing a current one is rarely a good idea.
What is much, much more effective is introducing large numbers of sterile animals of the same group into the wild though.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
kudos.
Alligators now being brought in to deal with Opossum problem. Rats move to Harlem.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I had one die in my parking spot a few months ago. Maybe it ate a bad rat.
How many times has man transplanted a wild animal or plant from one place to another to try to eradicate a pest? How many times has it succeeded?
Earlier this year my SO and I went to St. John, USVI for vacation. We learned how they had a major rat problem on the island back in the 1800's. Some enterprising individual decided to introduce a bunch of mongoose (mongeese?) to the island to eradicate the rats. The only problem is that the rats are nocturnal and mongoose aren't, so they just ended up with a rat problem at night and a mongoose problem during the day...
What the troll... From your argument... humans are better off to not do anything at all. But we know that isn't possible because every action has a reaction and life doesn't exactly stand still... Way to be constructive.
Comparing the removal of rats to Cuba and the economy is an awfully big stretch.
From your argument, we shouldn't even have money. Should we still be trading with horses and wives?
Back on-topic... Yes, New York messed up. But... learning from our actions, being able to document it for later generations and improve upon it next time is what makes us different from the opossums. This is why we don't go around blowing up whale carcasses anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possum#Introduction_into_New_Zealand Good luck with that, New York.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Even if they did elminate the rats we'd still have the same problem...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Possums are native to North America including NYC. They were probably eliminated in this part of NYC. Their re-introduction would probably have occurred naturally given time. So this whole article is superfluous, consider the source "NYPOST" a local rag, owned by FOX/Murdoch.
Time to move onto other articles.
Yes! Badgers with frigging lasers on their heads!
Perhaps she'll die.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
You're misunderstanding the situation. The Possums were not introduced to compete with rats; they were introduced to provide a steady source of protein for the homeless. Unfortunately, they neglected to teach the homeless how to catch 'em.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Wolverines!!!
I heard that when they play possum is when you pick them up by their tail and launch them into the shredding machine nearby,
if many of them can be fooled into playing possum, there would be no real work to be done except maybe
cleaning up afterwards the big mess left behind, but we can bring in a whole bunch of vultures to nest on the nearby island,
and then let them swoop in and eat away the carcasses....
Opossum's are particularly resistant to rabies due to a low body temperature+environment. That's just FUD sensationalism.
Don't badmouth the opossum like that.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Why is the asshole who keeps throwing out insults ("cowardly child-men", "ignorant rednecks") not being modded down?
BTW, I hope you get rabies. Beating an animal to death with a stick is far more cruel than shooting it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
New York won't have a problem. There is already a natural predator of the opossum: taxicabs.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm surprised they didn't go with mongooses - it worked so well in Hawaii:
http://www.susanscott.net/Oceanwatch2002/apr19-02.html
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My argument is simple: people can't predict a simple thing in a complex environment, like what would introduction of opossums do into an environment that didn't have them before.
It's as if people didn't have any prior experience in the matter. Oh, wait, yeah, they did.
your straw argument doesn't hold water either. I am not talking about trading horses, I am talking about the chances that gov't will do anything right when it concerns economy, as if it hasn't been tried before to control economy that way by a gov't. Yes, it has been tried. It was a failure. Watch the video debate I attached in the previous comment.
You can't handle the truth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsupial A marsupial is a mammal.
Possums are said to eat rats but I'll bet it's way easier, in Brooklyn, for them to find food that doesn't bite back. Live and let live.
Nate
Check out the comments on the NY Post web site! They make us look like PhD candidates in philosophy.
how many times will the history books record such foolishness...bringing a new species to wipe-out another species...has that ever worked in recorded history?
anyways, if they thought bringing in possums was a good idea, maybe they'll go for this:
give all the homeless guns and instruct them on how to clean and cook a possum. old folks down here in the south used to eat them when times were tough.
So, what you're saying is: people predict that getting the government out of the economy is going to save the economy.
I'm sure the irony was unintentional.
What are you, a pot? Or a kettle?
Having RTFA and the comments on the FA, I'd say that targeting rats was the wrong effort. They need to breed an oppossum that eats trolls. Man, that was a pretty intense display. I'll never complain about /. trolls again.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
"Release the mongoose!!!"
Why aren't there more Simpsons quotes?
Any Ozarks farm boy could have pointed out the folly of this solution. Opossums are adept survivors. They can thrive in urban environments quite easily. All they need is a reliable food source, like garbage, and they'll breed like, uh, rats.
Proverbs 21:19
Ok so the rats eat the trash. There is so much trash that it has to be hauled away in trucks every day. Possum eat trash too, by the way. Why would the possum chase after a rat when it can just eat nice stationary trash? Humf... I wonder if the dead rat population has been reduced?
I once encountered some city kids who thought an opossum they saw hanging around a dumpster was a rat. This now has me wondering how many of those "rats the size of small dogs" stories I've heard in the past were just mistaken identity. PS. I'm from the land of Pogo where opossums are not just a wild animal - they can be dinner!
Mama, I got 'dem ole cosmic blues again.
You are completely off your wagon there, there was nothing that crippled USA in that time period, the proof is the dramatic rising of the standard of living in that century, and if you didn't notice, nothing that happened in any local community in US had any effect whatsoever on other parts of the country, much less the world.
And USA didn't wage wars upon other nations all over the globe by using income tax money, and US gov't was so small that it was able to do whatever it did on sales taxes and the taxes were actually very low - single digits, under 2% low.
Go read a book.
You can't handle the truth.
-Nelson Muntz
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
The whole idea is almost mind-bogglingly dumb. Where did they get the idea that possums would eat rats? They mostly eat carrion and bugs.
Maybe for their next trick they can introduce a herd of cows... you know, to eat the possums.
What idiot would bring in possums to catch rats? Possums are herbivores.
Skunks with fricking lasers!
They're pretty dumb, and they're pretty nasty. One got into a fight with my three dogs a few weeks ago. It ended with a late night trip to the emergency vet for one of them. I can't imagine it ended well for the opossum, but it was dark and I couldn't really see the outcome of the fight, I could only hear it.
Lesson #1 in life... if you hear a thump and three angry dogs start barking, DO NOT run straight towards them.
To prove to the possum that it could be done.
That's what air rifles are for. .410 shotguns are for. Effective range about 20-25 yards max.
And also what
Just bring in sharks to eat the possums. (And please, no laser jokes. That would undermine the seriousness of my suggestion.)
Table-ized A.I.
+1 Informative, Opossums are indeed marsupials. Marsupials are mammals, hooray!
You seem to be having problems with the multiple levels there are of classification. At the highest level you have animal, plant etc. Then you have mammal, reptile, etc. Then you have marsupial, pachyderm, etc.
I'm not sure if it's epic, but you certainly fail.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
It is astounding that these northern city types fear such trivial critters as possums. I'll bet you guys are a real hoot with a rattler or a boar or a little black bear. Southerners have been known to cook all three and possums as well for supper.
Right, so the true statement that 19th century, with almost no government control produced much better results than the 20th century in terms of improving relative quality of life of people in the beginning and end of the century, while the 19th didn't have anything that could even closely be described as a 'depression', while 20th had one 'great' one and now there is another huge super-great one, this gets moderated a Troll.
Is that because moderators believe this is a false statement, or because they believe people shouldn't be reading about this?
You can't handle the truth.
Nuff said!
You're absolutely right. There were no significant differences between the 19th and 20th centuries, except for the level of governmental involvement in the economy. This proves your statement that the government is what caused the great depression.
You are completely off your wagon there, there was nothing that crippled USA in that time period
Except the major depressions of 1839 and 1873, the Panics of 1837, 1857 and 1893, the depressions of 1807 and 1815, and the recessions of 1802, 1812, 1822, 1825, and 1828. Other than that we did swimmingly.
Yeah that's why Canada and western Europe are total hellholes, because of their nasty awful regulation, which is exactly the same as Cuba/USSR-style communism.
Now the lightly regulated USA on the other hand is a proper free country, with it's stable economy, large and growing wealthy middle class, and affordable health care. Some day the USA might reach the dream of no regulation at all like Somalia once did.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There's a really simple solution to this problem - stop feeding the homeless.
... they don't freaking eat rats! So why the hell would you import them to deal with your rat problem?
They could have asked anybody from New Zealand about possums to find out how stupid an idea this is. Or they could have asked anyone from the north of Australia about cane toads to get the same sort of answer.
Your position sounds eminently reasonable, but unless you want to carry a pocket full of gold coins everywhere you go, you have to have a monetary system. I am sure that you are now jumping up and down babbling "gold standard, gold standard" but you need to remember a few things. The United States was on the gold standard for many years. Did we have crashes? You damn betcha! The gold standard as we implemented it had two problems one serious, and one cataclysmic. The serious problem is that the value of any commodity can be manipulated. Not good in any event, but seriously not good when the commodity in question is your monetary standard. The cataclysmic problem is that all the while we were on the gold standard, we also permitted our banks to engage in fractional reserve banking. Once you allow frb, you have effectively ceded control of your money supply to the most powerful banks. Now we come full circle: you are concerned that the government manipulates the market. Yes they do, and we would be better off if they didn't, but what you completely overlook, is the big con. The most powerful banks control the money supply. That makes government manipulation of the market look like tiddlywinks. I say first let's put control of the money supply in the hands of the government, (as the founding father's specifically intended!), with which we have a degree of transparency, and over whom we at least have some semblance of control, and then we can worry about prying their hands off the market. Actually, I expect that once the government has control of the money supply we and they will be too busy keeping an eye on each other to bother any more about messing with the market. In other words, my program is the only way you will ever get your wish. Of course my program is even more unlikely than yours, but at least it has a chance to succeed. Whereas your program, only challenging the small con, is doomed by the operators of the big con. Really, government only messes with the market in self defense as a middling counterweight to the power of the monetary system's operators. Middling, yes, but it is all they have, so they will never let go of it; not unless they first get control of the monetary system.
Did you notice I never mentioned the Fed? They are nothing. A red herring to mislead the supposed sophisticates.
Questions? Comments?
Social Credit would solve everything...
Oops. Fathers'
Social Credit would solve everything...
New York City is one of the two places in the United States that outlaws ferrets (the other being California, but that is changing). And ferrets are great ratters and mousers. They were widely bred and kept here in the US prior to WW II, for just that purpose: keeping down the mice and rats at farms. And they also make great pets.
Further, NOWHERE in the Western Hemisphere are there any feral colonies of the domestic variety of ferret. They just don't survive well here outside of captivity.
So New York, in its "infinite wisdom" (pardon the sarcasm), outlaws ferrets but imports possums, which ARE known to breed in the wild and form feral colonies.
Yet another reason I don't live in New York. Its leadership has made many decisions of this quality.
Didn't a few people also die of dysentery.
Also there was a pretty major civil war.
Not to mention cholera, polio, influenza was deadly. Oh and most people in the US were subsistance farmers or workers before and in the industrial revolution
Where's this Roman Guy to tell us how much better life was before then, what was the average life expectancy of an American in 1850, infant mortality, adult literacy?
Feck, in life expectancy alone the US is up about 10 years in the last 60 or 70.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What exactly is the relevance of a 19th century economy with industrialisation and a continent of untapped natural resources with endless almost-free labour to exploit it, with today's circumstances?
Not that any of this is remotely on topic.
I grew up on the North Shore of Queens. Well back in the 1970's there was already a huge population of "possums" back then,
This sounds to me like a totally uninformed city board member speaking up about something he knows absolutely nothing about.
Since the wildlife of the island is mostly unknown to most city folk, he couldn't fathom that they existed there naturally.
The reason the sanitation dept nor the health department knows nothing of the "possum drop" is because it only happened as a figment of the politician's mind.
As crazy as city politics is there is no chance they would have introduced possums as rat control. Ask any Parks Dept employee or any nature center on the island and this will be laughed at.
conventional wisdom = No wildlife could exist anywhere in the city without human introduction. Guess again.
1807 duration: 3 years.
1812 duration: half a year.
1815 duration: 6 years.
1822 duration: 1 year.
1825 duration: 1 year.
1828 duration: 1 year.
1839 duration: 1 year.
1857 duration: 1.5 years.
1873 duration: 5.5 years.
1893 duration: 1.7 years
-----
That's right, those are busts, which are CURES for the booms that preceded them. Government WAS NOT INVOLVED AND THOSE RECESSIONS ENDED.
1929-42 - that's 'Great Depression' that happened with gov't involvement, which turned a recession into an asset bubble, but US economy still was strong because it still had its manufacturing/production intact and when the war ended a lot of cheap labor came back from war and was utilized to rebuild the economy.
The Keynesian ideas were used all throughout the 20th century to try and re-pump the bubble before it burst, and because of this the inflation, the money printing, getting off the gold standard, giving powers to monopolies, setting wage laws, fixing prices, bailing monopolies out, gov't spending and wars, all of that is now resulted in the biggest bubble that is being pumped right now, the treasury bill bubble, the bond bubble, when it bursts, the US will print enough money to buy back all those useless papers thus turning USD into a piece of garbage, which will result in a hyper-inflationary depression.
Rather than that, the gov't is doing swimmingly.
You can't handle the truth.
Sounded just like that possum you described. Only, this gecko arrived and "departed" years before your kind possumy incident.
'cept, I asked this gecko if it had "Garbage Disposal Unit Accident-insurance", and it looked at me with a face like he just got out of the waiting-lines of the State Unemployment office.
Re-incarnation, perhaps?
I hear that the possums vote republican.
Take THAT you damn Yankees!
Lately, the last couple summers, I've seen a lot of opossums, now i know why.
Last summer, a kitten was born on my door step and i saw its mother fighting with a huge opossum over its survival.
The fight was epic, they were knocking over trash cans, hurdling each other 3ft into the air.
I should've made a video.
Honestly, if they could lower the feral cat population, that would also be a service.
I hate the smell of cat poopy.
Worst fecal smell ever!!!
But the plan doesn't seem to be working at all.
Yesterday i saw an opossum on the subway tracks with his head 3ft apart from his body, obviously cut off by a moving train, but this was at an above ground station in brooklyn.
I rarely see them in the subway system.
I usually see small brown mice or huge rats, especially in the underground stations in manhattan.
I also see tons of small brown mice in the parks of downtown manhattan, especially union sq.
I see opossum on the beach at night.
We need to find a predator that hunts/eats cats,mice,rats, and opossum but that doesnt multiply rapidly.
We need more chinese takeout spots and starving rednecks haha
If they would eat mosquitos too... would be nice.
This is exactly the same as inviting a friend over for dinner and he brings hs family and then the family decides to stay and they end up multiplying.
Or, to be specific its like expecting politicians to be honest.
Hint it just does not work, that is why we need term limits or somehow implanting an "honest" chip in them.
There are several variations of this of course like introducing mamals to a south sea island. They end up eating the species you are trying to control in the first place.
Humans will never understand that introducing a foriegn predator into an existing eco system will call (not probably) massive, unforeseen problems.
Simply stop selling and sending food to New York. When people begin starving, the most resourceful will look for food in trash. When they meet competition from the pesky critters, they'll kill them and even feed on them. Finally, when the possum problem is controlled, they can send food back into New York. Next, they can finally start thinking about how to deal with the rat problem appropriately!
My sig is better than your sig.