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Science

New Zealand Exterminates Rats 74

Posted by michael from the pied-piper dept.
-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."
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New Zealand Exterminates Rats More

New Zealand Exterminates Rats

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  • OSQ (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What they needed to do was get snakes to kill the rats, and then get some monkeys to kill the snakes.

    First shit

    • Re:OSQ (Score:3, Insightful)

      by msouth ( 10321 )
      Pretty much the same thing--they cut out the middle man, though, evolved the monkeys into humans, and had the humans kill the rats directly.

    • Re:OSQ (Score:3, Informative)

      by dargaud ( 518470 ) *

      What they needed to do was get snakes to kill the rats, and then get some monkeys to kill the snakes.

      Well, don't laugh, but it's been done before... Rats and mice were introduced (from boats) on Kerguelen [google.com], a large island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. When it was discovered that they ate the birds, eggs and chicks of many species, you know what those geniuses did ? Introduce cats !

      Cats that soon figured out it was easier to eat birds that nest on the ground and have to fighting habits than rats that h

  • 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.

    • Re:but.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by missing000 ( 602285 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @10:03AM (#6056451)
      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.
    • That's crazy. Ecosystems do NOT necessarily "adapt" to a more stable state, NOR to a better state. For an analogy, think of Genetic diversity is the real key to a stable ecosystem, because it increases the number of possibilities from mutation.

      Take the Mediterranean Sea, for example. There's a really god awful variety of aquatic seaweed which was introduced there in early 90s (or late 80s). It's reproduced like wildfire, and is taking over a huge portion of the Mediterranean Sea bed. You might say that "a

  • severely decimate decimate is an absolute (Score:4, Informative)

    by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @09:56AM (#6056390) Journal
    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.
  • Save the rats!

    Seriously... at some point we need to decide how much backtracking we want to do. Lets say we achieve a level of technology where we can hold the entire echosystem at it's present state. That's not necessarily a good thing. Ecosystems evolve. New species arive, old ones die out. Obviously we're accelerating that process dramatically, and we should try our best to prevent such human-caused changes, but once they occur, do we have the ability to reverse our changes without introducing new
    • at some point we need to decide how much backtracking we want to do

      How about we stop when we've corrected as many of our f*ck ups as we can?

      To not do anything in a situation like this would allow further native habitat and endangered species to be destroyed and so would be grossly negligent; are we going to let more species go the way of the giant moas or do something about it?

      Try not to demonstrate your private apathy publicly - these are serious issues whether you give a damn or not.
      • I do think they are very serious issues, which is why I worry that in the effort to undo our f*ups we will do further damage.

        Please note, I never advocated doing nothing, but trying to force a system back to its state before human meddling suffers from 2 problems:

        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 no

        • Re:T-Shirt slogan.... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by floydigus ( 415917 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @06:41PM (#6061862)
          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 [theshop.co.nz] - products made from the skins on NZ's wildlife enemy #1!

          • Let's take a little thought experiment... say there's a species of predetory bird in New Zealand, and it is also beeing kept in check by the rat population. Remove the rats, and this other species of bird starts taking over, finishing off species put on the brink by the rats.

            Obviously this is contrived, but ecosystems are some of the most complex systems we know of; we don't even know all the rules! It is impossible to predict all the consequences of removing the rats after 2 centuries.

            That said, ecosys
            • While it can be worthwhile thinking up extreme hypothetical situations, yours is ill-informed:
              The whole point is that these endangered species don't have any natural predators - which is exactly why the rats are so devastating.

              I was going to compose a much longer response but if you've now decided that you will play devil's advocate, there doesn't seem much point.

      • > How about we stop when we've corrected as many of our f*ck ups as we can?

        Yo, mphroqimwroa, what is with you and that chlorophyll shit you keep fuckin' around with? Oh, sure, you get your sugar out of sunlight, but fer Mowrqff's sake, don't you know that oxygen shit's fucking poisonous?! Someday we're gonna have to undo your mess, and may Mowrqff have mercy on your soul when we do.

        - some methanogenic dude

  • When i lived up in vermont, Lake Champlain was having a huge, serious issue with zebra mussels, such that they were crowding out local aquatic life and even stopping up natural drainage, etc. It was a frightening example of how one species could take over an area. They were trying everything from electric shocks to radio waves to specific toxins to get rid of them, and we all sat around watching the news and thinking, who the heck gave them the green light to try so many things at once? Obviously, it was the combination of EPA and local agricultural oversight groups, but it was still a toss-up which was scarier- the sudden overwhelming new population, or the multitudinous methods being simultaneously used to try to get rid of them.

    On another note, though, one of the most interesting species battles that i have ever seen was the fight between blackberry brambles and mint which took place outside a house that i lived in once. Mint is an incredibly hardy plant once you get a good crop of it. The thorns eventually won- the only thing that i've ever seen resist that mint horde. The mint even choked out the poison ivy, the grass, the dandelions, and everything else that crossed its path... but the blackberries won.

    Somehow, the rat story makes me feel sorry that the dodo is entirely extinct, and makes me aware of the dwindling wildlife habitats... time to take me to the ecology fund [ecologyfund.com] and donate somebody else's money to save rainforests. It's not offtopic, just an addendum.

    • Lake Champlain, dodos (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dpilot ( 134227 )
      Zebra mussels continue their takeover of Lake Champlain. AFAIK, there is no effective remedy, even if you're willing to dump nasty stuff into the lake.

      As for dodos, I heard an interesting story once upon a time - don't know if it's really true. There's a tree on the island where the dodos lived, and it's seeds had a really thick coat. The dodos ate the fruit, and the seeds passed, essentially untouched. The dodos would eat the seeds, again... and again... After something like a half-dozen passes through th
      • its true,

        what you don't hear is that on that tree you can bet that there were literaly hundreds of insect, fungi, and bacteria species that had host-specific relationships to that tree...hundreds for the price of one

      • Re:Lake Champlain, dodos (Score:3, Informative)

        by AlecC ( 512609 )
        It is true - exept that people have been able to mechanically reproduces the Dodo processing and germinate the seeds. This keeps getting rediscovered about every ten years, to great shouts of excitement about saving the tree species, but has been happening since the 1930s. See Douglas Adams "Last Chance to See", I think.
    • Actually over here (NZ) we don't have any snakes at all. That's part of the problem, they don't have big scary slithering predators after them all the time.
  • Won't the large quantities of poisons used also kill off any animals that eat it? Are they going to be able to remove it all from the ecosystem?

    • Re:What about the poison? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by E-prospero ( 30242 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @11:05AM (#6057118) Homepage
      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 [wa.gov.au].

      Russ %-)
      • rats are very inteligent and it is difficult to kill them all - they learn from mistakes. So the rat poison is usualy slow-acting. They use most often on rat Coumatox (coumidine derivative - similar to those that hart patients use as a blood thinner). It causes slow and painless internal bleeding and is cumulative.

        Fluoroacetate works quite fast, it blocks the metabolism (by mimicking acetate - gets transformed into fluorocitrate which blocks the citrate cyclus) and is most toxic on animals with fast metabo
  • ok? SHould we eradicate horses from the U.S? OR is it only the ugly littel animals noone likes that are worthy of extermination?
    • That is not entirely true. Horses have not taken over ecosystems and multiplied like wildfire and killed other species in the US. If anything, they probably refill the role of grazing that was lost when buffalo were all but eradicated. Cute and furry animals do get killed all the time- a good example would be kangaroos in Australia, where they apparently just run excessively rampant and the gov't takes steps to control the populations. That does not hold much water I know due to the fact that they are afaik indigenous to the region. I am not an expert on this stuff, so I cant really comment on what furry little animals have moved into ecosystems and destroyed them while humans looked the other way. But I do think you are off base on this. If cute furry litte beavers were taking over lakes in florida, killing off other species, I am pretty sure the EPA would do something.

      • Re:At what point do we decide introduced species a (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @11:47AM (#6057614) Homepage
        Cute and furry animals do get killed all the time...

        Two examples in the US that I know of are domestic rabbits and cats. I heard a bit on NPR a while back about some quiet little suburb that was being overrun by escaped domestic rabbits. They were destroying gardens and flower beds (no, this isn't as severe as disturbing natural species, I admit). The people weren't allowed to destroy the things, and they were getting pretty irked.

        If you search on plastic.com, you'll see a headline about how environmental groups (more specifically, bird-lovers) are on the anti-cat campaign trail. I can totally understand their point of view, as the little beasties are pretty evil and run unchecked in most every community.

        • Cats are really really evil.

          There once was a saying "man is the only animal that kills for fun." This is pure bull. The house cat, kills because it is wired to. I've even seen fish that seem to enjoy torturing their prey by pulling off fins of other fish (the Gar).

          I once thought it cruel when cats were kept inside and declawed but after tracking a well fed house cat and watch it kill small animals for fun, I reconsidered.

          Put up birdfeeders and flowers and keep the cats inside.
        • (paragraph about unchecked rabbits destroying a neighbourhood's gardens and flower beds)

          (paragraph about unchecked cats eating a neighbourhood's birdlife)

          Am I the only one seeing a solutions here? ;)

    • Yes - horses are an introduced species in the US, Australia, NZ, and other places. However, for the most part, they are controlled and domesticated, and therefore pose no real threat to the environment.

      However, free ranging horses cause all sort of environmental havoc. There a many free herds of brumbies (Aus. term for wild horses) in the Snowy Mountains and far north of Australia - and as a result, there are horse culling operations that fly around, shooting and baiting the herds.

      It's not the fact that a

  • In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Copperhead ( 187748 )
    New Zealand will be following up their success on Campbell Island by attempting to eradicate the European homo sapiens who have have been severely detrimental to the native population in North America.

    The European homo sapiens was brought to North American on sailing ships, and immediately begin to wipe out the native species, bringing them to the edge of extinction. The populatation of the European species has been stable on it's native habitat, due to self-policing of their population levels, and their

    • Hell, New Zealand doesn't need to go to North America for that. Ever hear of the Maori? Maybe they should clean up their own islands first.

  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by EABird ( 554070 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @10:12AM (#6056529)
    The Committee To Maintain The Status Quo (CTMSQ) is creating a plan to exterminate humanity. Afterwords 14 species of Dinosaurs will be introduced to the world.

  • ecosystems, people, and technology (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the argonaut ( 676260 ) on Wednesday May 28, 2003 @10:23AM (#6056657) Homepage Journal
    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...
    • 1.) these are not natural changes, they are human induced.

      Humans are somehow not part of nature? What we do doesn't count as being "natural"? Yes, we may be more "aware" of the world around us, but that doesn't make us any less a part of nature - if anything, it makes us more a part of it.

      If you were coming from a religious perspective, where God says that the plants and animals exist for humans to exploit, I might just let you get away with that attitude, but I am suspicious that that is not your angle.

      When a beaver builds a damn, it radically alters its envionment. Does that mean beaver-built damns are unnatural and bad? Is sentience really what separates environment alteration from being "good" vs. "bad"?

      And plants and animals can and do make their way to new places on their own (how did all those plants and animals get to Hawaii before the first humans did, given that the islands are thousands of miles from the nearest body of land?). Often it is an animal who is the agent for change - seeds get stuck on a bird's feathers (or fail to get digested upon being eaten) and drop off hundreds of miles away. If it happens "naturally" it is ok, but if humans (who are apparently not "natural") do it, it isn't? What's the difference between a migrating bird relocating something 500 miles away, and a human doing it?
      • yes, of course humans are "natural", although a lot of what humans do could be easily viewed as being unnatural. or perhaps more accurately, in opposition to.

        much of what humans do is akin to the actions of various other animals, such as the beaver or the bird in your example. the problem is the scale of the changes. a beaver builds a small dam that backs up a stream that creates a bit of a lake where there was none before, thus altering the flow of the stream and changing the character of the river eco
      • Humans are somehow not part of nature? What we do doesn't count as being "natural"?

        If you are going to use the human actions are natural argument then you have to realize that humans are still subject to the laws of nature. When a species' population runs unchecked and it expands beyond the ecosystems capability to support it, it suffers a massive population crash due to lack of resources which brings it back in line.

        Now, either humanity can recognize this natural law and attempt to self-police its
        • True enough but that argument has been tossed at human existence for quite a while and yet that population die back has yet to materialize.

          The question is have we exceeded sustainable growth rates. Fossile fuel aside I'd say we have not exceeded sustainable growth and there are energy alternatives.

          I'm not a fan of killing off birds but I have to ask in this case why are Birds better than Rats ? Why is it a good thing we are exterminating Rats ? Cause they are known carriers of Human pathogens ? Birds are
      • or lack thereof.

        nature is diverse. humans fight diversity then spread the strongest scavengers (rats, piegons, roaches) accidentally or intentionally and in the end could create a single large eco-system and call it nature. i don't believe humans raised in western civilization (myself included) are natural.

        'natural' is defined as being produced by nature. we are not natural. we are grown in cement and asphalt and lawn filled worlds, fed on processed foods and transported in machines whose metals ar
    • 1.) these are not natural changes, they are human induced.

      I don't get this about folks here. Either (a) humans are evolved and part of nature or (b) a God created humans separately and they are not part of nature. Your choice. Either we evolved and are simpley higher up the food chain and evolution will kill us if we over populate like any other species or we are created outside nature.

      Personally I like the idea there is a God who created us and gave us dominion over the creatures of the earth. Howev
      • the point wasn't meant to be that humans are not a part of nature or are unnatural, but rather that the actions that humans take are not. One only need look at our ability to create chemicals and materials that do not exist in nature to see that we have developed a sort of power that transcends nature.

        " However, something completely unforseen was that these rats would wreak havoc on this territory. There would really have been no reason to look for such a possiblity at the point the boats were created."
    • "just because it is not for human benefit doesn't mean it doesn't have value."

      As a human being, the only things of value to me are those which benefit human beings, and me in particular. The concept of value, without naming its beneficiary, is meaningless.

  • next (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Lets try this approach with lawyers.

    IANAL.

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I don't believe it (Score:2, Informative)

    by woo5 ( 630980 )
    Rats are smart. They adapt really fast to new kinds of poison. When they find food they send a test rat and watch it for a while. Only when this rat seams to be fine they go for the food. The period rats watch the scaperat got longer during the last decades. Its a real problem for rat poison manufactures. There must be some rats left. Rats that learned to avoid the pellets.
    • Rats are smart. They adapt really fast to new kinds of poison. When they find food they send a test rat and watch it for a while. Only when this rat seams to be fine they go for the food. The period rats watch the scaperat got longer during the last decades.

      Very interesting! Have you got any links to further information? Thanks.

    • Re:I don't believe it (Score:2, Informative)

      by Fizyx ( 93551 )
      It can be done, even in an an area that isn't an island (which certainly simplifies things). I live in Alberta, a very large Canadian province which produces a lot of grain. Because rats like to eat grain, it was worth getting rid of them. Alberta has been rat-free for 50 years. The return on that investment must be huge, some of the best tax dollars ever spent.

      Alberta is fortunate to be bounded by Rockies on the west, and the arctic on the north, and rat-free Montana on the south: there was only Saskatch

    • So if rats can test on each other why can't we?
  • Does anyone remember this nice little egg softener/pesticide? what are the long term effects of rat poison on the indiginous creatures of the region?
    Besides, how can they be sure they've got *all* the rats killed? or that someone won't be a prick and bring two rats to the island. After all, all it takes is two....
  • Are they sure that more rats won't swim or float (on driftwood) from other islands? This happens all the time, and is how many islands became populated with mammals.

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