Where people are really, really willing to kill for conservation
January 11, 2017 2:20 PM   Subscribe

New Zealand is planning to eradicate all invasive pests by 2050. After the announcement in 2016 of a plan to eradicate rats, stoats, possums and other invasive predators from New Zealand, Nature News looks at how it might be accomplished.
posted by 1head2arms2legs (59 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's easy; you just introduce a slightly larger animal to eat them.
posted by selfnoise at 2:24 PM on January 11, 2017 [25 favorites]


I'm thinking, birth control in the Tim Tams
posted by Auden at 2:28 PM on January 11, 2017 [8 favorites]


Each one kill one
posted by blakewest at 2:51 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


We huntses hobbits?
posted by biffa at 2:54 PM on January 11, 2017


Airlift them all to Australia?
posted by Thorzdad at 2:59 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


That was a good article. I work on invasive species in the US, and money is the problem. There are a lot of things that could be done if we could afford to do it, but we can't.
posted by acrasis at 3:02 PM on January 11, 2017 [8 favorites]


I dunno, I can't imagine how much money it would take to get rid of zebra mussels or feral pigs in Hawai'i. These things just seem unstoppable at this point.
posted by GuyZero at 3:09 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


Locally, this initiative has met with some skepticism. In particular, our Department of Conservation is woefully underfunded, while increasing tourism in our national parks is placing more and more strain on them. Meanwhile, science funding is a disaster, short term and competitive and wholly destructive to young scientists building a career.

Another obstacle is New Zealanders' attachment to their cats and dogs, a cultural phenomenon which I think is unlikly to change even in that time period.

This is better understood as an aspirational target, puffery even, than a real thing. Sorry.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:11 PM on January 11, 2017 [13 favorites]


They're brutes but you could hunt & kill the pigs if you put enough manpower into it. Mussels? How do you kill an ocean full of those things?
posted by scalefree at 3:15 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


There's a period after introduction when a concerted effort can eradicate an invasive species. However, in today's global economy, you are often dealing with multiple introductions and action must be taken immediately. That's hard no matter what, but especially hard these days when the pests being introduced are organisms new to science- you don't know where they came from or what their capacity for harm is.

The best case scenario is an invasive species like the Asian Longhorn beetle: it's large, leaves huge holes in the trees it attacks (so homeowners notice the damage when there are only a few beetles, not thousands) has a long life-cycle (over a year from egg to adult) and the insect is large and slow so it doesn't spread quickly. Efforts to contain it have been feasible. On the other hand is the emerald ash borer: a small, fast fecund beetle that is unstoppable and has literally decimated ash trees in the areas it inhabits.
posted by acrasis at 3:25 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


New Zealand is planning to eradicate all invasive pests by 2050.

So all the humans are moving to Australia?
posted by percor at 3:33 PM on January 11, 2017 [23 favorites]


I noticed that New Zealand has hedgehogs (presumably the European variety), whereas Australia doesn't (having only the marsupial knockoff, echidnas), and makes it clear that they are, along with other exotic fauna, unwelcome. I wonder why this is so; perhaps some homesick Pom brought a cage full on a ship to New Zealand, with the intention of farming them to bake in clay for special occasions or something?

Also, Australia might eradicate cats before NZ does; all they have to do is to persuade Rupert Murdoch that cat ownership is on the inner-city latte-leftist cultural-marxist side of the culture war, like bicycles and smashed avocado brunch.
posted by acb at 3:52 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


Orkney has just - 2010 - been invaded by stoats, which are now increasing exponentially. They mostly eat the Orkney Vole, which is of considerable interest because of what it can tell us about the post Ice Age colonisation of the islands by humans which brought it along for food - the vole is a unique subspecies of the common vole not seen elsewhere in the British Isles, but most closely related to a population in Belgium. It is also of interest to hen harriers and short-eared owls, who are very fond of them especially during the breeding season, so stoats gobbling up all the voles would be bad indeed.

You can see a worked example of how eradication is planned in a detailed report, on the back of which the Scottish nature authority is bidding for half a million quid to remove the stoaty threat - but this money normally comes largely from Europe, so...
posted by Devonian at 3:55 PM on January 11, 2017 [10 favorites]


Mussels? How do you kill an ocean full of those things? White wine, garlic and butter...
posted by Charles_Swan at 3:59 PM on January 11, 2017 [10 favorites]


Surely the stoat pelts could be sold to the grasping classes for fur. They're not that different from an ermine, mink or other mustelidae. Use that to finance eradication.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 4:05 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


That exact business model is thriving for the invasive possums (which hopefully are not) of New Zealand.
posted by Devonian at 4:15 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


A...beetle that is unstoppable and has literally decimated ash trees in the areas it inhabits.

Literally decimated: it kills one in ten trees
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:15 PM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]


Stoats in Winter coats are ermine!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 4:16 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


Surely the stoat pelts could be sold to the grasping classes for fur. They're not that different from an ermine, mink or other mustelidae. Use that to finance eradication

Wouldn't that counterproductively incentivize the conservation -- or even breeding -- of the monetized species?

I mean, New Zealand sells a lot of sheep skins, but sheep don't exactly seem to be on their way out any time soon.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:21 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


You keep using that word, but I literally do not think it means what you think it means.

It's legal to breed sheep. It's thunderously illegal to breed possums. And, as the Orkney report shows, the ecologists have a lot of nous when it comes to monitoring numbers and checking they're following the model. I don't think illicit possum pelt farming would last very long.
posted by Devonian at 4:27 PM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


Mussels? How do you kill an ocean full of those things?

White wine, garlic and butter...


Pfft. This ain't Belgium. Fritters, man! A lot of fritters.
posted by Soulfather at 4:28 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


The Macquarie Island eradication was astoundingly successful, but it's hard to imagine scaling it up to something the size of NZ. Here's an interesting article written by one of the dog trainers.

That being said, it's worth doing, and it would be an incredible achievement.
posted by kjs4 at 4:40 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


New Zealand is planning to eradicate all invasive pests by 2050.

So all the humans are moving to Australia?

Nah just sending the Australians back home...
posted by Merlin The Happy Pig at 4:50 PM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


Okay, one in ten doesn't sound like much, I guess. But the side effects of that kind of destruction can be profound. Much fewer than 1 in ten tan oaks have been killed in California by Sudden Oak Death, but the consequences are wide: there is a greater danger of forest fires, less food (acorns) for animals and birds, and the more open canopy allows the forest floor to be colonized by invasive weeds that otherwise couldn't grow there. One invasive species can make way for more invasive species.
posted by acrasis at 5:12 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


But the tanoak is native, isn't it? It's intrinsic to a co-evolved ecosystem. Invasive species are not, and there's lots of evidence that the damage they do can be replenished quite rapidly once they're removed, right back to the original status quo - after all, a stable ecosystem is very good at coping with variations in its member species. Too muchd damage, and the other constituents are harmed too much to do this, which is why you really want to get in quick, but removing an invasive species is very different from removing a native one.
posted by Devonian at 5:19 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


The History of Rat Control in Alberta

We don't have a breeding rat population. We apparently have around eight dedicated rat police. This may only have worked though because they started the program around when the rats first arrived.
posted by lookoutbelow at 5:53 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wouldn't that counterproductively incentivize the conservation -- or even breeding -- of the monetized species?

Cobra Effect
posted by rhizome at 5:58 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


The Alberta rat control program is crazy. It sounds just as impossible as ridding the ocean of mussels, yet apparently people have never seen rats there.

I literally just saw dozens walking my dog around the block. The bushes rustle when we walk past. Rats seem as inevitable as pigeons.
posted by bradbane at 7:14 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


The main problem with monetizing pest killing is that people then introduce them to pest free areas (despite the green/pure nz propaganda a lot of folk here hate nature s much as they hate people who care for what we've got left) this has happened in nz, but I don't have any proofs on hand as mobile right now.
posted by unearthed at 7:23 PM on January 11, 2017


unearthed, you are talking about the Cobra effect.
posted by fings at 7:37 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


Apparently another thing with Alberta is that it's so cold in winter that rats cannot live except in and around human dwellings. So they inspect every dwelling in a certain area every year for rats (seriously...), but they don't have to worry about rats overwintering in a field or something. Additionally, the rat buffer is very sparsely populated, so there are not that many dwellings to inspect. They also caught the rat invasion just in time and happened to be able to use a relatively non-terrible poison to do it. It's quite a special situation, really.
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:40 PM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


I admit, my first thought was a grimdark Looney Toons reboot.
posted by klangklangston at 7:43 PM on January 11, 2017


This is better understood as an aspirational target, puffery even, than a real thing. Sorry.

Sufficiently long-term as to be unmeasurable, but putting a marker out there in an attempt to convince blue-green voters that they can vote blue rather than Green, I suspect.
posted by Pink Frost at 7:48 PM on January 11, 2017




bradbane, I have to walk my dog myself but if we had rats here I'd hire them like you do. Smart.
posted by GuyZero at 10:05 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


Thanks fings, I didn't know it had a name (other than selfishness). Joe Bennet's an acquired taste but he's right about the Eden reference: I get asked to 'restore' ecosystems - I usually get blank looks when my first question is "restore them to what state, what time in history": In NZ we have nearly two centuries of western farming culminating in (among other things) massive additions to soil of urea and superphosphate; we've lost the majority of birds (and so the ability of many plants to be pollinated and get their seeds spread around); outside of national parks ecosystems are extremely fragmented; and yeah pests; oh and the CO2 level's increased >45% which is resulting in some ongoing plant distribution changes.
posted by unearthed at 1:06 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


Mussels? How do you kill an ocean full of those things?

Gene drive. It's my new favourite "man was not meant to meddle" thing.
posted by Leon at 5:30 AM on January 12, 2017


Calm down people, the oceans are already free of zebra mussels.
posted by ryanrs at 5:41 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah zebra mussels are freshwater species people.
posted by fshgrl at 6:15 AM on January 12, 2017


I'm far from a capitalist but I am more than a little convinced that, for larger invasive species at least (not so much blights, beetles, aphids, or maybe even mussels), it could very well be possible, and maybe even easiest/cheapest, to eradicate them by simply offering a bounty and letting the market do the rest.

Anyone know if this has been given a thorough go somewhere with a goal of full eradication with plenty of resources to throw at it, bonus points for a closed environment like New Zealand (yes, I know it's big, but it's still an island for the most part)?

It might even help, though it could encourage breeders looking to cash in illegitimately, to implement a sliding scale on the bounty such that as the population became smaller, and thus harder to target, and less skin were turned in for payment that the price per skin would increase such that it would still remain popular/profitable for the hunters/exterminators.

Lots of potential issues but by god if you open up the floodgates for human beings to make a profit then they will go to extreme lengths to make it happen. See various poaching-to-extinction behaviors that have happened in the last few decades/centuries.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:48 AM on January 12, 2017


You have to be careful not to have the bounty exceed the cost of raising an animal. Bounties have worked great to eradicate wolves for example.

GuyZero: "feral pigs in Hawai'i."

I'm always amazed something as large and delicious as a feral pig isn't easily controlled by an open hunting season. Rats and other small pests can hide out where people live; not so for pigs.
posted by Mitheral at 9:19 AM on January 12, 2017


I'm always amazed something as large and delicious as a feral pig isn't easily controlled by an open hunting season.

In the case of Hawai'i, yup, I completely agree with you and don't understand either. Because island. Then again I haven't been there so what do I know about the situation on the ground.

But in the case of a place like the US South, where they are invasive and a menace to all manner of living things, I can understand the hardship since there's no clearly delineated borders that might help with containing them whilst you exterminate them. Ditto for the pet snakes in southern Florida that escape to the Everglades / swamps and breed and grow (both individually and as a population) to huge sizes...
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:26 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


wasn't every animal, including humans, invasive at one point or another?
posted by judson at 9:28 AM on January 12, 2017


wasn't every animal, including humans, invasive at one point or another?

The meta is strong with this one.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:30 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


So I'm reading up on feral pigs now and it seems that there isn't an actual effort to eliminate them in Texas because farmers make money off of selling hunting privileges on their land.
posted by Mitheral at 9:34 AM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm always amazed something as large and delicious as a feral pig isn't easily controlled by an open hunting season.

as far as I can tell pigs are amazingly good at avoiding people and avoiding getting caught. According to this article from Honolulu, the issue with bounties is that it encourages clandestine pig breeding. :/
posted by GuyZero at 9:49 AM on January 12, 2017


Sure if set high enough. No one is going to be raising pigs for a $5 bounty but it would encourage teenage hunters. Get 4 or 5 pigs and you've paid your expenses.

But it also seems there is a problem of access; property owners don't want hunters harvesting on their land. This is one of the obstacles New Zealand has identified too and the only solution is political will. Property owners have to see the pigs as a greater risk than hunters. That's going to be a tough sell in the States.

And conflicts with other user groups (hikers, dog walkers, forest harvesters and people who simply disagree with hunting and or culling of any animal) need to be managed. This is usually handled by limiting hunting to specific days (EG: every Thursday) often in combination with limits on equipment (specifically bow only).
posted by Mitheral at 10:24 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm always amazed something as large and delicious as a feral pig isn't easily controlled by an open hunting season.

Hawaii has a problem with feral cows. You are underestimating the difficulty of hunting dangerous game in dense, mountainous tropical rainforest.
posted by ryanrs at 11:05 AM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]


Yeah, if you have to have an invasive species, it's definitely a bonus if they're as tasty as wild pigs are. The industry that's grown up around them doesn't surprise me.
posted by fiercecupcake at 11:10 AM on January 12, 2017


One way around the Cobra Effect problem is to incentivize the activity of hunting itself, rather than putting a bounty on corpses. E.g. if you gave tax breaks or some other incentive for landowners to allow hunting of invasive species on their land. That's not easily perverted—although if the hunting industry becomes too big, then you'll have people breeding and releasing invasive species just as a game animal, which was traditionally a source of a lot of invasive species. But you could work around that if you provided a guaranteed incentive for land access regardless of whether or not hunting actually occurs (so even if the invasive species are gone by year 3, you get a guarantee of 10 years of payments or something at the outset).
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:16 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


"Year of the Pig" by Mark Hainds is a pretty good look at using hunting for the suppression of an invasive game species.
The author decides to hunt wild pigs in 10 or 11 of the United States. He is a plant biologist who works on a research tree plantation in Alabama, where he hunts hogs for food.
As he travels to other states, you get a glimpse of the different ways the states are attempting to encourage hunting. He tries to avoid canned hunts where the landowner breeds or releases animals but in Texas (of course) he does go to one of those places.
It's a good read, if you like that sort of thing; tales of hunting pigs interspersed with discussions on long-leaf and loblolly pines.

Any time a person can monetize harvesting an invasive, people will find a way to foster that invasive.
posted by Seamus at 2:04 PM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]


So I was at a meeting on invasive species today and I met a real, live New Zealand scientist, plus someone who did postdoctoral work there and a guy familiar with the whole NZ plan. I asked them about this and they agreed: it is amazingly comprehensive and well thought out, but is unlikely to totally work, although parts of it might. They think the possum might get reduced to manageable levels, and maybe the rats. But they, and scientists in this field in general, always want to try and see. That's why we've devoted out lives to this.
posted by acrasis at 2:16 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


even in fairly isolated, isolatable islands or peninsulas, it can be staggeringly hard to eradicate invasive species. New Zealand's beloved, rapidly vanishing, kakapo is covered in a section of Rat Island. There were several false starts.

conversely, at least one island's invasive pig problem was solved by a single scientist with a shotgun.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 3:01 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


Whenever I hear about invasive species all I can think of is this scene from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a short lived show that was both great & terrible. This is the first sort.
posted by scalefree at 10:51 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


Rats and other small pests can hide out where people live; not so for pigs.

I read this and, no offense, but I imagine someone who has never gone out in the mountains and looked for game. Game species make their living not being easy to find. Pigs, in particular, are fucking magical at hiding from people. And hiking steep forested hillsides in the heat is a bitch.

I also don't know too many families who let groups of teens go hunting with scoped high powered rifles alone either. That's generally a one adult per teen minimum activity.
posted by fshgrl at 6:59 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Rifle? Dogs and a knife is the old school way.

(that early scene with Bella in Hunt For The Wilderpeople is classical NZ pig-sticking albeit without enough pig dogs).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:27 AM on January 13, 2017


fshgrl: "I read this and, no offense, but I imagine someone who has never gone out in the mountains and looked for game. Game species make their living not being easy to find. Pigs, in particular, are fucking magical at hiding from people. And hiking steep forested hillsides in the heat is a bitch."

No offence taken, I've done it with camera and gun in -30 and +40 but dry not humid. At any rate my point was more that feral pigs aren't going to be hiding in attics or garbage bins or other dark corners of urban infrastructure.

In BC it is pretty common for younger members of family groups to hunt together; they only need one sister/cousin/uncle to be 18.
posted by Mitheral at 11:18 AM on January 13, 2017


Pigs are smart. Given even a small amount of hunting pressure, they disappear or turn entirely nocturnal.
posted by Seamus at 2:23 PM on January 17, 2017


That's hilarious to me for some reason, like I wouldn't expect pigs to exhibit any kind of group behavior.
posted by rhizome at 3:29 PM on January 17, 2017


« Older Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers   |   “Pikachu, you're a three-two!” Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments