While The Cat's Away: How Removing An Invasive Species Devastated A World Heritage Island:
Removing an invasive species from sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site, has caused environmental devastation that will cost more than A$24 million to remedy, ecologists have revealed. Writing in the new issue of the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, they warn that conservation agencies worldwide must learn important lessons from what happened on Macquarie Island.
Shorter:"invasive" and "introduced" organisms for a long enough period results in an ecosystem approaching a new equilibrium. Ask the South American Marsupials.
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Sounds like they were really dozy: rabbits breed like, er, rabbits, and a nasty predator like cats would clearly be controlling them to some extent. And there are plenty of islands where uncontrolled rabbits have led to close-cropped vegetation with little good regrowth.
Blasting the bunnies with myxamatosis would have at least been a sensible preliminary. Perhaps they thought that cutting down the rabbits would cause the cats to hunt the birds more? In which case, cull them in tandem to keep the ratio of population sizes broadly similar.
But you're right in your point that the island (probably) had a new equilibrium ecosystem before the interference: it's a difficult question as to whether "restitution" of old ecosystems is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing, especially if endangered species are involved.
True - although it doesn't sound like a new equilibrium had been reached in this case, since the decision to destroy the cat population was motivated by the fact that the cats were destroying the bird population.
I don't much care for your word "retard" but it would seem to be applicable in this case. What bloody dimwits! And these cretinous morons are the sort of mentally defective twerps who preach green goodiness to the rest of us. Plonkers!
Blasting the bunnies with myxamatosis would have at least been a sensible preliminary. Perhaps they thought that cutting down the rabbits would cause the cats to hunt the birds more? In which case, cull them in tandem to keep the ratio of population sizes broadly similar.
If you'd followed the link, you'd have seen that they *did* blast the rabbits with myxomatosis - and this *did* lead to the xcats hunting the birds more (the rabbit population having been pretty much decimated). That's *why* they decided to cull the cats... They seem to have assumed myxomatosis would keep the rabbit population under control, but they - uh - miscalculated.