Mustelids and possums
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@Crucial Got me thinking now (not always a good thing).Weren't mustelids introduced in the late 1800's to get rid of the rabbits? Thought that was why they were in NZ. That worked about as well as cane toads in Aus.
Are there any examples of biological pest control that have worked and not just introduced a new pest?
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@Snowy nah no palms, they live in flax bushes.
I had 3 mice in my traps yesterday, but we don't have a problem that we see any of these pests, and as we have a new build on a concrete slab there is only one place anything can get in and an adult rat wouldn't fit.
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@Snowy I can't recall the pest it is being introduced to deal with, but NRC have been granted consent to introduce some wasp to deal with another pest.
Edit Just googled it, and is 2 insects to deal with an invasive plant.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/the-country/news/article.cfm?c_id=16&objectid=11783802
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@taniwharugby Hmmm. Wasps (German and common) were a great introduction the first time...(although accidental not biological control I think).
This reed may be a problem but maybe creating another unforeseen one.
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@booboo said in Mustelids and possums:
Nah. I think there just isn't enough known about how a new species will adapt and be adapted. Too many unknowns and the law of unintended consequences.
you sound like you're running in the state election for One Nation
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Faark off @mariner4life
I'm not talking climate change.
My point about to many unknowns was based was based on faintly remembered memories about the introduction of calicivirus.
Farmers just wanted it lobbed in as soon as possible.
Scientists wanted to hold off until they knew more and could maximise the effect.
Was introduced unofficially and randomly and after initial decline we now have just as many bunnies but they're resistant.
Koi carp were meant go be the shit when they were introduced.
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problem with introduced species is that while they might like eating this invasive weed/pest in their homeland, they will just as easily find some native plant/insect to eat instead....plus wasps are cnuts!
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IF HUMAN beings could have conversations with animals, many a conservationist would bring up the subject of invasive plants. “Try this one,” they would plead with their fauna. “It’s new, it may take some getting used to, but it’s nutritious. And it really, really needs a natural enemy around here.”
Such a meeting of minds has taken place, after a fashion, in Hungary. The animals in question are rabbits. A group of biologists led by Vilmos Altbäcker of Kaposvar University have persuaded these lagomorphs to add common milkweed to their diet.
Milkweeds are native to North America, and famous there as host of the caterpillars of the monarch butterfly. Elsewhere, though, they can be pests, for they are poisonous to many grazing animals, notably cattle, sheep and horses. But not to rabbits, at least not the common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, that has been overwhelming Kiskunsag National Park in Hungary. When confined to cages, and offered little other food, rabbits will eat it and thrive.
That is a far cry from persuading wild rabbits of milkweed’s virtues. But Dr Altbäcker thought this could be done, based on an earlier discovery of his—that the rabbits of Kiskunsag have dietary traditions. In one corner of the park, for instance, their favourite winter food is juniper. In another part, by contrast, they shun that plant. Experiments he conducted with transplanted junipers proved the difference was not in the food. Rather, it was a matter of the local rabbits’ culinary preferences.
Persuading animals to acquire a taste for a previously shunned plant is not unprecedented. Some farmers train their livestock to eat certain weeds as well as grass, and calves will even pick up the habit from the example of their elders. Dr Altbäcker’s goal, though, was to perform this feat with a species in the wild, where such cultural transmission is much harder to engineer—particularly because rabbit kittens leave the nest as soon as they are weaned, and thereafter fend for themselves, giving them little chance to learn by example.
But observing their mothers is not the only way that kittens might learn what to eat. The chemistry of the milk they are drinking might give them clues, as might the edible faecal pellets all rabbits produce as a way of digesting their fibrous vegetable food twice. And Dr Altbäcker did indeed establish that both milk and pellets from rabbits which had consumed milkweed would cause the next generation to prefer that plant to regular laboratory food.
This still left one obstacle to milkweed’s introduction into rabbit cuisine. Young rabbits are born in winter and early spring, whereas milkweed plants do not pop up until May. On the face of things, milkweed molecules thus have no way to get into rabbits’ milk and edible faeces in the wild. But Dr Altbäcker backed a hunch that such molecules might hang around in a mother’s body long enough (perhaps stored in her fat) to carry a message from the previous season. He therefore tested the preferences of kittens born to mothers taken off milkweed three months beforehand (long enough to mimic the time between the end of the milkweed’s growing season and the beginning of the rabbits’ breeding season) and found that although these youngsters were not quite as happy to consume milkweed as those in the earlier experiment, they liked it better than control litters did.
The next step would thus seem to be to introduce milkweed-primed rabbits into Kiskunsag and see what happens. Unfortunately, says Dr Altbäcker, Kiskunsag’s management is not minded to accept an addition to the park’s rabbit population. It may even have a point. In Hungary, rabbits are themselves an invasive species, brought from Iberia in Roman times. Why take the chance of introducing a souped-up version?
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@gollum said in Mustelids and possums:
Monarch Butterfly, introduced to eat milk weed. Eats milk weed. Don't think it does anything bad...
The monarch is considered a native because it was self introduced it seems, not a biological control, but it's actually quite funny. We have loads of milkweed / swan plant around here which nobody will remove because they want to keep the monarchs. People were even buying the plants to support the monarch population - so for different reasons that hasn't really worked to remove the plants.
Paper wasps eat monarch caterpillars apparently which means we also have heaps of wasps. So the monarchs are inadvertently supporting a pest.
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@Snowy when we moved into our current place, planted swan plants for monarchs, first 2 years, plants couldn't keep up with caterpillars, now we have bigger single plants and hardly any caterpillars.
I thought the monarch caterpillar was poisonous....but wasps are cnuts so maybe they are suicide wasps. I have had a couple of battles with decent sized wasp nests at my old place
