23 December 2014

Lessons from kiwis: “Conservation is all about killing things”

A New Yorker article starts off talking about killing an awful lot of rats on New Zealand, but makes its way to discussing invasive species more generally:

he project of reshuffling the world’s flora and fauna, which began slowly with the spread of species like the Pacific rat and sped up thanks to the efforts of acclimatization societies, has now, with global trade and travel, accelerated to the point that, on any given day, something like ten thousand species are being moved around just in the ballast water of supertankers.

The picture is of Nick Smith, NZ conservation minister, in one of the photo ops with dead rats described in the article.

Many conservation efforts around crayfish involve killing a lot of invasive crayfish. But it’s unlikely many magazine articles will be written about that.

External links

The big kill

Picture from here.

Hat tip to Mary Mangan.

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