Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species by Landers Jackson

Author:Landers, Jackson [Landers, Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2012-09-05T07:00:00+00:00

Nutria

Months after returning from the lizard hunt on Boca Grande, I got an e-mail from Jeff Latham, the journalist I’d met there. We’d kept in touch online since meeting in Florida, and now he wanted to pitch an article about my work with invasive species to a national men’s magazine. We went down the list of species and trips that I had coming up, and after a long detour in which we hoped to be running off to Alsace-Lorraine for wild boar, we somehow settled on chasing nutria around the swamps of Louisiana.

In spite of the odd name, nutria is neither an artificial sweetener nor a brand of dog food. Rather, it’s a very large semiaquatic rodent from South America. Imagine a beaver with a round tail that breeds as rapidly as a Norwegian rat. Known by some indigenous peoples as coypu, the animal was encountered by Spanish explorers who seem to have mistaken it for the otter — thus its name, nutria, which is Spanish for otter. The name stuck and followed the animal to North America.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, nutria were exported around the United States and Europe for use as breeding stock on fur farms. The price of nutria skins was never as high as that of beaver skins, but the animals grew so big so rapidly that they could be raised in captivity much more easily and profitably. A female nutria can be ready to breed at three months old, and she can become pregnant again the day after giving birth.

As fur prices vacillated, fur-ranching operations occasionally went bust, and the remaining nutria were often released into the wild. Populations became established in Louisiana in the 1930s, though it was decades before anyone realized how much of a problem they would become.

Nutria usually live in small family groups in burrows they dig into the banks of bodies of water; this habit leads to heavy erosion. Riverbanks collapse and levees weaken to the point of failure. And as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, Louisiana’s levee system is extremely important to the survival of its human inhabitants.

Nutria also out-compete the native muskrats, and sometimes beavers, for limited resources. Both nutria and muskrats are herbivores that eat similar foods in the same areas. In the long run, the muskrats lose out where the two species overlap; the nutria breed faster and outnumber the muskrats over time. Also, large groups of nutria will sometimes attack a beaver lodge in force, killing the beavers and taking over the lodge as their own.

They also have a dramatic effect on the native flora. In fact, the damage they inflict on the plants of Louisiana is far out of proportion to their food needs. Inexplicably, nutria will chew through the stalk of a plant in order to eat five percent of it, wasting the other ninety-five percent as they move on to the next one.

With their notoriously high numbers in the drainage canals of New Orleans, I expected nutria to be one of the easier species to bag, and then eat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.