Macquarie Island Springs Back To Life After Multiple Invasive Species Finally Removed

[hatrack]

On a world map, Macquarie Island is a speck in the Southern Ocean, but for ecologists it is a beacon, illuminating a future for grand-scale environmental recovery projects. Melissa Houghton first set foot on the 34km-long green streak as a dog handler in late 2011. Rabbits, cats, rats and mice had been introduced by sealers in the 1800s and were wreaking havoc on the world heritage site. At their peak, there were approximately 300,000 European rabbits and an untold number of black rats and house mice.

During their trip, Houghton and a labrador named Wags found what would prove to be the last vertebrate pests left on the island: an adult rabbit and her young. In 2014, Macquarie was declared pest free, the largest island to successfully eliminate rabbits to date. Ten years after Wags sniffed out the last rabbit, the island has sprung back to life, and Houghton has stuck around to witness the change. She gave up dog handling, became a scientist and completed her PhD as part of the research team monitoring the island’s resurgence. “Seeing it rebound, knowing it’s got a long way to go, and that we don’t know what else is going to happen, it’s so exciting,” Houghton says.
An all-you-can-eat buffet

Houghton remembers being “blown away” by her first views of Macquarie Island after a three-day voyage south from Tasmania in 2011. Its beaches were crowded with hulking elephant seals and raucous colonies of endemic royal penguins. But Keith Springer, who was leading the Macquarie Island Pest Eradication Project, warned her that beyond the beaches the once biodiverse and unique island was so damaged that it was “nothing but a pretty paddock”. Attempts to rid the island of pests had already been under way for some years. The last feral cat was shot in 2000, poison drops were used in 2010 to kill the rats and mice, with rabbits also being targeted. But after the accidental poisoning of native birds, calicivirus (a rabbit haemorrhagic disease) was released in February 2011 to further reduce rabbit numbers.

Houghton and Wags were one of several teams sent to scour the island for surviving pests. “There are massive steep coast cliffs all the way round the island. There might be a few hundred rabbits, but it just seemed impossible [to find them],” she says. Trudging through the landscape, Houghton saw the damage the pests had wreaked. Before the sealers, the largest creatures eating the island’s vegetation were insects. So for rabbits it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. The island had been dominated by giant tussock grass and swaying forests of megaherbs, such as Macquarie Island cabbage, which can grow taller than a human. This, says Houghton, is “like celery, very delicious, so the rabbits just absolutely loved it and smashed it”, stripping the landscape and destabilising slopes where grey-headed albatross nested. “You’d have slime and lichen and landslips where albatrosses were trying to raise chicks and survive.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/10/rats-and-rabbits-invasive-species-macquarie-island-southern-ocean-aoe

[Karadeniz]

1. Amazing!!!

[mopinko]

2. sir david attenborough says rewilding can fix the planet. set aside 30% of the surface

of the land and sea, and do stuff like this- weed out the pests, and in a decade we reverse the trends. he cited successful efforts to restore fish stocks but just roping off the spawning sites. almost immediate rebound and record highs w/in a decade.

make sure all the critical elements are there, like wolves in yellowstone or buffalo on the prairie. or goats on weedy city lots, like mine.
i remember an early restoration project by me- the desplaines river wet lands. they went to great trouble and expense to import and plant appropriate native species. but i know from my experience that all you have to do is stop fighting them, the natives are there.
it was a stunning success tho. w/in a couple years many threatened species returned. much of the rest of the river is protected, county owned or city owned. it's quite the refuge for migrants, part of the mississippi flyway, and near lake mich.

stories like this make me so happy. now if they could do this in hawaii.

[hunter]

3. Hooray, you're back!

Only 30%??? I think we should aim for 50%.

Let nature be nature. We don't have to convert every square inch of land to some human utility.

[mopinko]

4. yeah, so happy. if ppl would just kill their lawns....

i'm sorely tempted to get a couple goats and rent them out. i'm right near a commuter line that has a hella time maintaining their sidings. there's a few dune restorations on the lake that could use some nibbling.
cashmere goats. that's what i want.

[2naSalit]

5. Attempts are being made...

On the continent as well. Far more complex and sadly, political.

How Rewilding Could Restore The Colorado River Flows
By George Wuerthner On October 7, 2022

[snip]

While conserving water through policy changes, one of the most effective and least expensive ways to retain more water is to rewild the Southern Rockies of Colorado and northern New Mexico and the Mogollon Plateau of Arizona and New Mexico. Rewilding means we reestablish and enhance native species populations and native ecosystems, so their ecological function is improved and restored.

A paper published in Bio Science by 20 authors, including myself, proposes the creation of a Rewilding System across the West that would result in massive amounts of water retention in the headwaters of the Colorado River, and its tributaries would slowly “leak” flows throughout the year. The ecological restoration of streams has numerous other environmental benefits as well.

[snip]

Currently, it costs the federal government far more to administer the grazing program than it receives in fees. And this does not even account for the cost to society from damaged watersheds or the lost opportunities to store water and carbon.

However, the most significant benefit to society of Rewilding the mountains of the Southern Rockies and Mogollon Plateau may be the increase of water storage and enhanced flows in the Colorado River.

https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2022/10/07/how-rewilding-could-restore-the-colorado-river-flows/

Long article, worth the read.