A strange tale from New Scientist (via):
The boiling of millions of penguins on a remote Antarctic island triggered one of the first international wildlife campaigns. A century on, DNA analysis proves it has been a success. Now, Macquarie Island's king penguins must face rampaging rabbits.
A hundred years ago, New Zealand blubber merchant Joseph Hatch made his fortune on Macquarie by boiling 3 million penguins to extract oil for lamps. Large colonies of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) on the island, halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, seemed doomed. By the time an international campaign put an end to the carnage in 1919, there was just one colony of around 4000 penguins left.
Today, numbers are back above half a million, and this week, DNA analysts report that the genetic diversity of the population is close to preslaughter levels. "It is remarkable that a nearly extinct population has recovered levels of past genetic diversity in only 80 years," says Tim Heupink of Griffith University in Nathan, Australia.
More on the dastardly Joseph Hatch and his Norwegian steam-pressure digestor - penguins in, oil out - here and here (pdf).
But putting right the damage caused by our meddling forebears is not so straightforward:
Victorian visitors brought rats and mice to the island. Their successors brought cats to eat the rodents and rabbits for food. Each in turn ran riot. Recently, a campaign to eradicate the cats has caused a rabbit boom. The rabbits have eaten so much grass that they are exposing penguin chicks to attack by skua birds. Their grazing has also triggered landslips, one of which partly buried a penguin colony in 2006. So, last year, Tasmanian scientists began eradicating rabbits. The carnage continues.
Why don't they just introduce foxes to deal with the rabbits? What could possibly go wrong?
Better yet, Myxomatosis.
It worked in Oz...sort of.
Posted by: DaninVan | February 23, 2012 at 06:08 PM