Destruction of wetlands: swamp rats eating away at Louisiana's fragile coastline

[nitpicker]

https://www.dw.com/en/destruction-of-wetlands-swamp-rats-eating-away-at-louisianas-fragile-coastline/a-49054631

Destruction of wetlands: swamp rats eating away at Louisiana's fragile coastline

Date 17.07.2019
Author Mara Lazer

With its maze of swamps, bayous and marshes, southern Louisiana is a place where alligators laze with one eye open, egrets and herons fly among Spanish moss and where oak trees sprawl. It's a place of great natural beauty. But that beauty is being eaten away by climate change, rising sea levels, increasingly dangerous tropical storms, oil and gas industries that dredge and cut into the land. And by the nutria.

About the size of a domestic cat, the animal also known as the swamp rat has brown fur, a beaver-like head and long and destructive orange incisors. It's those teeth and the animals' predilection for swamp vegetation that makes them a pest in the state of Louisiana, where coastal land loss is a real problem.
(snip)

Nutria eat the roots of vegetation in swamps, to the point that they have no chance of growing back. They can eat large swaths of marshes overnight, leaving open water in their path.

First brought to the region from South America by fur farmers in the late 19th century, swamp rats took to their new home easily. So easily, that their numbers exploded across southern Louisiana. That led to a booming fur business that thrived until the mid-1980s, when pelts fell out of fashion. As a result, nutria numbers soared, and the state experienced massive land loss.

Because the animals have no natural predators in the area, locals have, over the years, launched several initiatives to curb the population.
(snip)

Of everything that's been tried, the Coastwide Nutria Control Program, which pays hunters and trappers 4.4€ ($5) for every nutria tail they bring in, has been the most successful. By 2002, the numbers had dropped.

[littlemissmartypants]

1. I recently watched this documentary

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/rodents-of-unusual-size/

It's worth a look.


RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE
BY QUINN COSTELLO, CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER | IN HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT
Premiered January 14, 2019

About the Film
Rodents of Unusual Size is a real-life horror "tail."

Louisiana residents south of New Orleans have faced many an environmental threat, from oil spills to devastating hurricanes. But a growing menace now lurks in the bayous and backwaters: hordes of monstrous 20-pound swamp rats known as nutria. The voracious appetite of this invasive species from South America is accelerating erosion of the state’s coastal wetlands, already one of the largest disappearing landmasses in the world. But the people who have lived there for generations are not the type of folks to give up without a fight.

The film features a feisty mix of rejuvenated trappers, adventurous chefs, bold fashionistas, exotic pet enthusiasts, and more. This joyful take on an ecological menace reveals in equal parts our impact on the environment and the local's surprising solutions to save their land before it dissolves beneath their feet. It is human vs. rodent — may the best mammal win.

Snip.
More at the link.

Thank you for the post, nitpicker.
❤