The "Man-Rabbit War" lasting for a hundred years
The magic performance of rabbits: from 17 to 10 billion.
In our country, most animals will be eaten by people. Therefore, if the "game" of rabbits was not protected, it would have been extinct. However, in Australia, rabbits can be flooded, which makes many foodies puzzled: is rabbit meat not fragrant?
Australia is a country with unique species, because it was separated from other continents as early as 50 million years ago, making it impossible for Australian native species to communicate with other continents, forming a unique biodiversity dominated by marsupials. However, although there are many kinds of marsupials in Australia, there was not even a rabbit hair in 65438+ before the end of 1950s. At this time, Australia has long been a British colony.
Because the British people liked hunting at that time, among many colonists, a man named Thomas Austin entrusted his nephew who was far away from England to bring back 17 rabbits from England in 1859. At first, he wanted to put them on his farm to hunt.
17 rabbits, 12 rabbits are rabbits, and 5 rabbits are European cave rabbits. Because rabbits are domesticated by cave rabbits, there is no reproductive isolation between them. As a result, 17 rabbits became 24 rabbits without being released. After that, Thomas Austin put all the 24 rabbits on the farm. However, what he didn't expect was that his hunting didn't kill the 24 rabbits. On the contrary, six years later, that is, 1865, these 24 rabbits propagated wildly and became tens of thousands of troops.
These rabbits are good at digging holes (most rabbits in China have no habit of digging holes), so they easily cross the fence of the farm and enter the wild environment. In Australia, there were only a few marsupials and Australian wild dogs. They already have a stable diet in Australia, so in the absence of natural enemies and constraints, these rabbits began to breed wildly again. Coupled with the imitation of some colonists, there are more and more rabbits in the wild. By the end of 19, the number of rabbits in Australia had reached 35 million. By the 1920s, the number of rabbits had expanded to 654.38+000 billion.
At this point, the rabbits in Australia were completely out of control.
"man-rabbit war"
The sharp increase in the number of rabbits has brought a fatal blow to the original ecology. Cave rabbits and crazy eating make local herbivores miserable. Therefore, from 1870, at the beginning of rabbit flooding, Australia took measures, including offering a reward for hunting and poisoning. However, with its natural enemies and strong reproductive ability, it did not stop rabbits from flooding.
Later, in order to control these rabbits in one area, Australia invested a lot of manpower and material resources to build isolation fences to prevent the rabbits from expanding. However, at that time, the ability of rabbits to dig holes was underestimated, and this fence, which was thousands of kilometers long, ended in failure.
In 1950s, Australia introduced myxoma virus, the "natural enemy" of the cave rabbit, from Europe. This is a virus with high mortality, which can spread rapidly in cave rabbits and only in cave rabbits. At that time, after the virus was introduced into Australia, it was madly spread to rabbits with mosquitoes. In just two years, more than 90% rabbits died of this virus.
However, with the passage of time, the surviving rabbits gradually developed antibodies to the virus, which brought the battle to an abrupt end again, and the number of rabbits was fixed at about 600 million. At that time, more than 20 rabbits could develop into a tens of billions of troops. Therefore, Australia has not slackened off, and will still invest a lot of manpower and financial resources to control the number of rabbits every year.
At this point, a man-rabbit war that has lasted for more than 100 years has not stopped, and it seems difficult to stop.
Why not introduce natural enemy lynx to eliminate rampant rabbits?
In nature, rabbits have many natural enemies. Because of this, in the native environment, although rabbits have strong reproductive ability, it is very difficult to flood. Among the many natural enemies of rabbits, Eurasian lynx is definitely one of the biggest natural enemies, because more than 80% of the diet of Eurasian lynx is all kinds of rabbits. According to statistics, in the Eurasian lynx distribution area, they can digest about 40% of the rabbit population at most, and are called "rabbit killers". From this point of view, it is possible to introduce lynx to eliminate rampant rabbits. But why don't Australians do this? The reason is that they don't want to make the same mistake again.
The introduction of natural enemies to inhibit rabbit reproduction was thought of and implemented in Australia as early as 1885. 1885, the number of rabbits in Australia has already exceeded10 million. In order to curb the spread of rabbits, Australia introduced the fox, the natural enemy of rabbits. When it was first introduced, it was put into Victoria and most parts of southern Australia.
At first, the fox devoted himself to actively killing rabbits. After all, in the fox's native environment, rabbits account for a relatively large proportion of food. However, it didn't take long for the problem to appear: the fox found many small and medium-sized marsupials in Australia. They have been in an environment lacking natural enemies for a long time, almost alert, stupid and very easy to be killed. Therefore, the fox turned his finger at marsupials in Australia. For a time, a large number of marsupials were killed by foxes, and the burrowing rabbits who were good at digging holes and alert made foxes turn a blind eye.
Finally, foxes not only failed to control the problem of rabbit flooding, but also flooded themselves, so Australia had to reactivate the reward (50 yuan for each fox tail) to control foxes.
Eurasian lynx is bigger than fox (the average weight of red fox is only about 6 kg, while the average weight of Eurasian lynx can reach 30 kg). In terms of aggressiveness, cats are more aggressive and have stronger hunting ability than canines. Therefore, after being put into the body of the lynx, the lynx.
abstract
Rabbit flooding in Australia has been going on for more than 100 years. During this period, Australia used various methods, including eating, poisoning (virus), concentrated killing and releasing natural enemies, but failed to make rabbits disappear from Australia. Most importantly, the method of introducing natural enemies can not only solve the problem of rabbit disease, but also cause the proliferation of introduced species, which poses a great threat to native species. Therefore, it is not that Australia does not introduce lynx-controlled rabbits, but does not dare to introduce them again.