Aussies Could Use Elephants To Fight Invasive Species 274
A type of invasive African grass is a major cause of wildfires in Australia. The giant gamba grass is too large for cattle and the native marsupial grazers to eat, but David Bowman, a professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania has a plan. He says that elephants or rhinoceroses could eat the pest grass. "... the only other methods likely to control gamba grass involve using chemicals or physically clearing the land, which would destroy the habitat. Using mega-herbivores may ultimately be more practical and cost-effective, and it would help to conserve animals that are threatened by poaching in their native environments," he said. This plan makes you wonder just how big a Chinese needle snake can grow.
Gamba Grass was intentionally introduced ... (Score:5, Informative)
From here [qld.gov.au] [PDF].
Re:Need more dangerous animals (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see. The gestation period of an elephant is 21-23 months. The interval between calves is as much as five years. And female elephants generally don't even begin reproducing until they are 12-14 years old.
I somehow doubt there will be a plague of elephants. What I imagine would happen is a lot of poached elephants.
Re:how about more people? (Score:4, Informative)
Have you been to Australia?
The majority of people live in big sprawling cities by the coast, for the reason that the rest of the country is an arid desert ...
Any city built inland would run out of water very quickly .... Imagine Las Vegas, but without a water supply ...
Re:End game (Score:5, Informative)
Its been proposed that the elephants are sterilised first.
Re:Elephant Proof Fence (Score:4, Informative)
"Yes it did. It didn't do the job perfectly, but the rabbit population has never returned to what it was pre-myxomatosis."
Exactly, it worked even here in Europe and we had no problems in the first place.
A french moron wanted to get rid of the rabbits on his property and infected _2_ of them.
Now all of Europe has almost none left.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis [wikipedia.org]
Re:End game (Score:5, Informative)
Kruger park has a massive over-population of elephants. It has a carrying-capacity (the number that the land-mass can sustainably support without being detrimental to the ecosystem) of about 8,000 elephants and now has over 20,000 (and still rising) causing major problem (both ecologically and politically as to how to reduce the numbers without resulting to a mass-cull).
Contraception is not exactly feasible on a large-scale (it's been tried successfully on small reserves such as Makalali) but the problem of finding and contracepting all/most of the animals in the wild and making sure that you've not contracepted the same animal twice in one period (major health issues for the animal) is almost impossible.
Re:Uhh, goats? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, Elephants are f***ing awesome and all, big, giant things that knock over trees when they get mad, but goats are well proven to eat grass and other things (like briers) that most animals won't touch. They handle dry, arid climates well, and provide other useful things like, Milk, Cheese, Meat, and Pelts. If you pick angora goats you get fancy wool from them as well.
Been there, done that they went feral : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_goats_in_Australia [wikipedia.org]. Though some farmers to make a fair living off mustering the ferals and then selling them for pelts and meat.
Re:End game (Score:5, Informative)
In Australia, the police and customs are much more effective. It's also really hard to get assault guns, so gangs tend to be massively outgunned by the authorities. We had some locally made "Owen Guns" (WWII carbines) getting made in an illegal factory in 2004; that's how starved our gangs are for hardware. Even the "good" African countries will have trouble, because gangs will be able to smuggle guns and ivory across land boarders to and from the "bad" countries.