Kafloymengullah

frezned:

gauntjaws:

frezned:

I just read basically the most interesting article ever.

Some amazing guy reckons we should introduce elephants into Australia’s bush ecosystem to control bushfires.

Just… incredible.

Yes, because introducing animals into Australia has always worked in the past!

When it was rabbits it was toffs who wanted to hunt, but this proposal is from a professor of environmental change biology. Like… presumably he knows what he’s talking about more than anyone in the world (except for other professors of environmental change biology).

I actually just had a tutorial session on this kind of thing for one of my classes today (4th year conservation biology). In North America there has been an idea brought forth of pleistocene re-wilding, which is basically reintroducing mega-fauna to North America that existed here before humans started to “exploit” them and cause extinction of a lot of them. What they want to do is bring in animals like elephants (to represent wooly mamoths), lions, tigers and grazing ungulates back into the wild in order to turn the landscape back to what it was like in the pliestocene with their grazing (so replace young forests with grass lands).

We discussed this idea for ages, and pretty much came up all negatives. Introducing an exotic species into a novel environment can lead to SO many problems. Invasive species (like your Cane Toad dudes), to bringing in new diseases that can wipe out already present biodiversity (so like a hypothetical crazy elephant disease is brought over that doesn’t suck so much for elephants, but apparently it can transfer to koalas, leading to koala extinction), to what do you do if an elephant/lion decides to go charge/eat some school children…

Basically the whole idea is that you can’t predict all of the potential results from introducing a species into a new area. It may seem like a cool idea (and the donkey is an example of an exotic species introduction at the grand canyon), but in the long run most of the time the costs outway the benefits.

There is also an example of the introduction of the Mongoose in a country (I can’t seem to remember the name, but some googling should be able to find it) to control the snake population. The mongoose (mongooses? je ne sais pas) were able to bring the snake population way down…but then they moved onto another food resource, which was sea turtle nests. So now they have a mongoose problem and a rapidly declining population of turtles.

Anyway, now all I can think about is the song “I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she’ll die….”

END OF NOVEL, Sorry I got excited I guess, woops