Australia is an ancient and magical land, and you can see on the map that it is far from the mainland and surrounded by the sea, so when europeans first discovered Australia, they debated whether it was a continent or an island.
Satellite view of Australia
The question of whether it is a continent or an island can be put aside, but Australia's extremely isolated geographical location has brought it very special natural conditions, and Australia has been known as the World Museum of Living Fossils since its discovery.
When Europeans arrived in Australia, they brought many new creatures, such as sheep and rabbits.
Australia is known as a country that sits on the back of a sheep
The former benefited Australians, while the latter brought disaster to the land.
Rabbits are very common in our country, not only the fur can be used for clothing, the meat can also be eaten, the more famous dish is Sichuan cuisine spicy rabbit head. It is even kept as a pet because of its cute appearance.
There are even rumors on the Internet that rabbits are so cute that they can eat rabbits! Oh, what a fragrance!
The story of the rabbit invading Australia told today is not so beautiful.
In 1788, the first British immigrants landed in Sydney, Australia, by boat, and they brought rabbits to Australia.
Soon people found that the natural environment near Sydney was particularly suitable for raising rabbits, and the number of people raising rabbits increased, and rabbit meat became a common meat on the table of ordinary people.
At this time, most of the rabbits are domesticated, either living in cages or living in fences, and there are almost no hares.
hare
Fast forward to 1859 when a farmer named Austin immigrated to Australia from England.
He himself loved to hunt, but when he arrived in Australia, he found that there were no suitable animals for hunting, so in order to satisfy his desire to hunt, he entrusted some small animals from England and put them in the wild for hunting, including more than 20 rabbits.
His practice was emulated by other farmers, and the practice of raising small animals in the wild gradually became popular, and trouble followed.
Rabbits have a very strong reproductive ability, and Australia has never had this species of rabbits, there will be no natural enemies of rabbits, rabbits live very happily in Australia, and breed non-stop all year round.
The rabbit herd spread for 4 weeks at a rate of more than 100 kilometers per year, quickly encroaching on large areas of grassland.
Because southern Australia is far from the equator and the climate is warm and humid, suitable for rabbits to survive, rabbits in southern Australia are flooded.
The loss of control of the rabbit population has also brought about a serious ecological disaster.
There are mainly the following points:
The first is the huge loss to Australia's agriculture and livestock industry. Among them, especially the livestock industry has suffered serious losses.
Although Australia is surrounded by the Yellow Sea, but if you look at the map, you will find that it is mountainous on both sides, like a pair of parentheses, which expands most of Australia, so that water vapor is more difficult to penetrate into the inland area, so the precipitation in the australian inland area is not very large, many places are desert or grassland, such an environment is not suitable for reclamation into farmland, more suitable as pasture, used to raise sheep.
Hares are infested
The huge herd of rabbits eats high-quality pasture, making it impossible to continue grazing on large areas of grassland.
The second is that it has directly or indirectly caused a large number of species extinctions. After the flood of rabbits, it has seized the living resources and activity space of many australian native wild animals. It is not only the animals that are affected, but many young trees have not been spared due to the rabbit's habit of nibbling on the bark.
The third is soil erosion in Australia. Rabbits eat a lot of vegetation on the surface, exposing the topsoil, and in the event of strong winds, the topsoil will be swept away by the wind. Australia's inland precipitation is insufficient, the ecological environment is fragile, plant growth is slow, and it takes a long time for the underlying ecosystem to recover once it is damaged.
Like the Australian rabbit, if a species migrates into a new environment and causes ecological disasters in the local area, then this phenomenon is called biological invasion.
By the end of the 19th century, Australians finally couldn't sit still, and they began to try various methods to eliminate rabbits.
The local government also offered huge bonuses to solicit ways to eliminate rabbits safely and effectively. More than 1,000 proposals were soon received from around the world.
Hunting and setting traps is the most direct way to kill hares.
In addition, choose drugs that are harmful to rabbits, but harmless to people and other livestock to poison rabbits.
It was also suggested that fences be built to control the movement of hares. This proposal was endorsed by the Australian Government.
In order to control the migration of hares, the Australian government has even built fences that stretch for hundreds of kilometers, but these methods are only effective in small areas and are time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Due to Australia's vast territory, these methods are undoubtedly a drop in the bucket if you want to kill hundreds of millions of rabbits living in the wild.
Is there a more effective way?
French microbiologist Pasteur proposed that rabbits can be killed by microorganisms infecting rabbits, but it is very difficult to find a microorganism that can spread quickly among rabbits and infect rabbits without harming people and other livestock.
After more than half a century of research, until the 1950s, scientists finally found that a myxomavirus was very effective, which could first release these viruses into mosquitoes, and then pass the virus to rabbits through mosquitoes, which could quickly spread among rabbits and have a very high mortality rate.
The approach was immediate, and all at once the number of rabbits in Australia plummeted, from about 600 million to about 100 million.
However, there is also a problem with this method, that is, a small number of rabbits infected with the virus but not dead will have resistance, and this resistance to the virus will be passed on to the next generation, so over time, the effect of this method will become worse and worse. So by the 1990s, rabbit populations were gradually recovering. In order to prevent the recurrence of the disaster, Australian scientists have to constantly experiment with various viruses.
In addition, there is a problem with this method, that is, the virus will not only kill hares, but also the rabbits raised on farms. The Australian government has launched a new variant of the virus two years ago, and at the same time as the virus is being released, the government recommends to those who live in the breeders to vaccinate their own rabbits.
It seems that this human-rabbit war, which has lasted for more than 100 years, will continue forever.
China has also introduced many kinds of organisms, due to the insufficient early scientific research demonstration, resulting in the introduction of new species to trigger biological invasion, such as the southern water hyacinth, Fushou snail and catfish.
Biological invasion is not a trivial matter, from the perspective of Australia's human rabbit war, alien species if not well handled, it is very easy to cause biological invasion, which will have a greater impact on the environment and native species.