Mustelids and possums
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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. âTry this one,â they would plead with their fauna. âItâs new, it may take some getting used to, but itâs nutritious. And it really, really needs a natural enemy around here.â
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 milkweedâs virtues. But Dr Altbäcker thought this could be done, based on an earlier discovery of hisâthat 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 rabbitsâ 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 Altbäckerâs goal, though, was to perform this feat with a species in the wild, where such cultural transmission is much harder to engineerâparticularly 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 milkweedâs 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 rabbitsâ milk and edible faeces in the wild. But Dr Altbäcker backed a hunch that such molecules might hang around in a motherâs 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 milkweedâs growing season and the beginning of the rabbitsâ 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, Kiskunsagâs management is not minded to accept an addition to the parkâs 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
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@gollum Yeah we grew them at school as well to learn the life cycle. More interesting than watching a bloody mosquito's metamorphosis.
@taniwharugby They are poisonous as they absorb some of the toxin from the swan plant but (as in Gollum's article above) only to some species. Unfortunately the paper wasp must be immune (and yes wasps are cnuts).
Have learnt quite a lot about monarchs lately as I'm not allowed to pull swan plant out of the garden at certain times if it will hurt the butterflies / caterpillars.
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@Snowy I won my battles with the wasp nests, but they got in a few good shots, and by fuck it felt felt like I'd been hit round the ankle by the cane when 3 stung me at the same time.
1 nest was in the ground, about 40cm deep, 30 wide and 20 high...stuffed a coke bottle half full of petrol in and left it...more effective than burning it but much less fun.
I dunno how we had never been stung or noticed it as it was a part we walked past pretty much daily.
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Looks like grass carp, which may have benn the source of my confusion re koi, are a bit of a success as they don't breed particularly well in NZ and can be contained with the right fish passage measures: http://www.doc.govt.nz/get-involved/apply-for-permits/interacting-with-freshwater-species/options-for-weed-control/grass-carp/
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@taniwharugby The stings certainly bloody hurt. I copped one a few days ago and wife had to get an ambulance a year or so ago with anaphylatic shock after a few stings.
A neighbour used your nest eradication method but did set it on fire - along with about half an acre of hillside. Quite spectacular, but he doesn't have anymore wasps.
@booboo So it seems there has been one bio control introduction due to them being very fussy about reproduction. QI about what they will eat depending on temperature as well.
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@nzzp Thanks.Hopefully they are all that they are made out to be and your Dad just lives in a pristine environment.
When I set one up around here I expect to have a huge pile of rat and stoat corpses under it within a few minutes. I will probably have to sit next to it so that I can take them all away in wheel barrow.
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@taniwharugby said in Mustelids and possums:
I hate wasps. More wasps would be horrible.
Wouldn't it be better for the govt. to set aside funds, to be paid back to people who bring in this weed? By weight. Extra pocket money for kids. They have to cut it off at the bottom and spray a weedkiller on that, take a photo of each one.
Something like that? -
@Snowy How did you get on with your trapping programme?
I've got at least a couple of bait shy rats living in the ceiling and need to find a new way of taking them out. Saw those Good Nature traps in Farmlands a couple of days ago and was reminded of this thread.
Do they work?
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@Chris-B he ain't trapping animals these days đ
