Even rabbits will bite when they are angry. How serious are invasive species?

In China, rabbits are a delicacy on the table. They are almost extinct. Wild rabbits have become protected animals. There are a total of 9 species of wild rabbits in my country, of which three are second-class protected animals, namely Tarim rabbit, Hainan rabbit and snow rabbit; the other 6 species, grass rabbit, South China rabbit, plateau rabbit, Northeast rabbit, Southwest rabbit and Northeast black rabbit, are "three protected animals" and are also protected by the state.

What are "Three-protected Animals"? They are terrestrial wild animals that are beneficial or have important economic or scientific research value. There is a difference between the protection of "Three-protected Animals" and "Second-level Protection". For "Second-level Protection", no one can be killed, otherwise it is a crime. "Three-protected Animals" cannot be killed at will, and killing a small number is illegal, and killing more than 20 animals is a crime.

It seems that rabbits in China are now very happy and protected. However, rabbits in Australia are not only not protected, but also rewarded for hunting. Why is there such "racial discrimination"? Let's find out together.

Australia's unique biological system

Australia is surrounded by the sea and is located between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. It is the only country in the world whose territory covers a continent. Australia has a land area of ​​7.692 million square kilometers, ranking sixth in the world.

50 million years ago, Australia was still connected to other continental plates. With the movement of the earth's plates, the Australian plate gradually drifted to become an independent continent, isolated from other continents. As a result, the animals and plants on this continent formed reproductive isolation from other continents and evolved into a biological system with Australian characteristics.

According to statistics, Australia has 378 species of mammals, 828 species of birds, 300 species of lizards, 140 species of snakes, 2 species of crocodiles, more than 4,000 species of fish, and 50 species of marine mammals. 80% of these mammals, reptiles and frogs are unique to Australia, forming an evolutionary chain and food chain with its own characteristics.

In the competition for survival, marsupial mammals in other continents have basically become extinct, but Australia has preserved them, with 55 species of kangaroos and wallabies alone. Most of these animals are very docile, and you can tell how kind they are by looking at the silly appearance of koalas.

Even the more aggressive kangaroos never bite, at most they kick with their hooves. Most of these animals are vegetarians, eating grass and leaves, just like living in paradise. It is all because of humans, especially outsiders, that the living environment of these animals has changed.

These outsiders are the colonizers.

Modern gene sequencing studies have proven that all humans in the world are descended from African Homo sapiens. 100,000 years ago, these African Homo sapiens began to migrate to all parts of the world, and a group of people arrived in Australia 40,000 years ago and became the indigenous people here. These people, like the animals here, have been living in a primitive state due to isolation from the outside world.

However, human beings in some parts of the world have experienced rapid development in the past few thousand years, especially in the past few hundred years. As Europe developed with the Industrial Revolution and the Capitalist Revolution, explorers from some developed countries began a new round of migration in search of new continents.

In 1606, the Dutchman William Janssen became the first foreigner to land in Australia. He believed that he discovered this continent and named it "New Holland". However, he did not stay there and there was no news of him. In 1770, the British navigator Captain Cook discovered the east coast of Australia, named it "New South Wales", and declared that this territory belonged to Britain.

In this way, the British began to come here one after another, and at first they used this wild land as a place to exile prisoners, because here the prisoners could not escape. On January 18, 1788, a fleet of six ships led by Captain Phillips landed in Australia, with a total of 1,530 people on board, including 736 prisoners.

On January 26, these people announced the establishment of the first British colony in Port Jackson, Australia, which later became Sydney, and January 26 became Australia's National Day. As the number of people increased, people gradually moved inland from Sydney, and the colony gradually expanded to the whole of Australia.

In 1859, a key figure came and it was his arrival that almost changed the entire ecology of Australia, or in other words, it caused a devastating blow to the Australian ecology. This person was called Austin, who was sent by the British to this isolated island where criminals were imprisoned as a warden. When he had nothing to do, his biggest hobby was hunting.

Austin had a nephew who saw his uncle suffering in a distant place, so he mailed him 20 rabbits to help him replenish his body. However, Austin did not eat these rabbits, but kept them in his own farm. Rabbits reproduce very quickly, especially 5 of these 20 rabbits are wild rabbits from Europe. A female rabbit can produce 18 to 30 pups a year, and a baby rabbit only needs 6 months to reach sexual maturity and start giving birth again.

Austin was very excited to see the rabbits multiplying more and more. He used them as live targets on his ranch. However, his hunting could not keep up with the rabbits' reproduction speed. In just six years, there were tens of thousands of rabbits. Austin's ranch was already crowded with rabbits and eaten up. The rabbits had no food, so they dug holes and broke through the fence to spread out.

The freed rabbits happily hopped on the vast grasslands of Australia. They had no natural enemies here, just like living in paradise. Only kangaroos and koalas watched their offspring grow in number. These rabbits spread to the surrounding areas at a speed of 130 kilometers per year.

In Austin's time, no one felt that this was a bad thing, and both the natives and the colonists seemed to have more food. But in just a few decades, by the end of the 19th century, it had become a disaster. I didn't find out when Austin died, so I don't know if he saw the consequences of the disaster he caused.

Anyway, by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the rampant rabbits had become a nightmare for Australians. However, some sources do not attribute this crime to Austen alone, but to the colonists who began to pour into Australia in the late 18th century. Many of the increasing number of colonists brought rabbits with them, and Austen was just one of them.

Why don't Australians eat all the rabbits?

By the 1920s, these rabbits had multiplied to a terrifying 10 billion. You have to remember that at that time, the population of Australia was only over 5 million, and one person had to deal with 2,000 rabbits! So, some people say, won’t they eat them? This statement is as stupid as the ancient emperor’s saying, “Why not eat meat?”

In fact, Australians still eat a lot of rabbits. Before rabbits became a disaster, Australians were delighted for a long time because there was a new delicacy on the table. And during the world famine, Australians were saved from starvation because of rabbit meat, and some even made a fortune by selling rabbit meat and rabbit skins.

But there are too many rabbits to eat. You know, a female rabbit can give birth to 20 to 30 rabbits a year, and a female rabbit will give birth to another cub every 6 months. Who can calculate how many rabbits a female rabbit can breed in a year? What are the numbers of two years, five years, and ten years?

If one person eats one rabbit a day, and 5 million people, including the elderly, the weak, women and children, eat them, they can only eat 1.8 billion rabbits a year. How many rabbits can be reproduced by 10 billion rabbits a year? So they can never eat them all, even if there are 1.4 billion people in China. Of course, if 1.4 billion people eat them, they can eat one rabbit a day, but this is impossible.

These desperately reproducing rabbits devour Australia's abundant green resources, even eating up the roots. This has caused large patches of vegetation to disappear and large tracts of land to become desertified. The holes the rabbits dig everywhere have also caused the land to become loose, and under the erosion of rainwater, soil erosion and landslides have occurred frequently.

Australia's cute and honest native animals are even worse off. The rabbits have taken over their living resources and space, leaving them homeless and hungry, and increasingly declining. The rat-kangaroo is Australia's oldest and smallest marsupial. It was still seen everywhere on the Australian continent in the early 19th century, but was declared extinct in the last century after the rabbits became rampant. Other kangaroos, emus, platypuses, etc. have also seen a sharp decline in numbers.

The growth rate of rabbits did not slow down at all, and once reached 18 billion, which caused panic and attention from the Australian government.

Thus, Australia kicked off the century-long human-rabbit war.

At first, it was a people's war, with a national mobilization, rewards and encouragement for people across the country to hunt and kill rabbits. People used various means, even extreme means, such as hunting, traps, poisoning, burning, etc., but still could not stop the proliferation of rabbits. Later, the government increased the reward, with the highest reward reaching 25,000 pounds.

You should know that 1 pound contains 7.32 grams of gold. At that time, the average worker's annual salary was only about 10 pounds, and 25,000 pounds was a huge fortune, which attracted many people around the world to try. Even the famous French microbiologist Pasteur sent three assistants with a tube of chicken cholera bacteria in an attempt to kill the rabbits by infecting them with chicken cholera bacteria.

Unfortunately, the experiment failed because rabbits are not chickens and are not sensitive to fowl cholera bacteria.

Later, the government suddenly came up with a brilliant idea, which was to introduce foxes, the natural enemies of rabbits, and let the foxes kill them. At first, it did work. The foxes had never seen so many rabbits before, and they had a good meal for a while. But soon, the foxes found that there was a lot of food to eat in Australia, and that the native animals in Australia were not as fast as rabbits, so they were easier to hunt, so they no longer had any interest in rabbits.

Not only were the rabbits not eliminated, but wolves were invited into the house, bringing another major scourge to Australia's indigenous animals. In order to prevent the extinction of those vulnerable groups in Australia, people had to pick up hunting rifles to eliminate foxes. The plan of bringing in "mercenary" foxes to eliminate the rabbits ended in failure.

The government seemed to have run out of ideas, so it followed the ancient Chinese method of building the Great Wall to resist invasion. After seven years of hard work, it built a wire fence running from north to south in an attempt to keep the rabbits in the east and protect the fertile land in the west. The total length of this wire fence is more than 3,000 kilometers, making it the longest wire fence project in the world.

But the rabbits who can dig holes completely disdained this seemingly unbreakable project. They quickly broke through the defense through tunnel warfare (drilling holes). Coupled with the corrosion of the natural environment, these iron nets were soon riddled with holes and became useless. This huge encirclement and suppression project failed again. The Australian government was frustrated and launched a series of offensives in a rage.

These attacks included fire, bombing, poisoning, and even the use of bombers used against the Japanese in World War II, but instead of bombs, they dropped poison gas bombs. Government officials used bombers to drop thousands of poison gas bombs on the sparsely populated areas where rabbits mainly live. But these poisonous gases killed some rabbits and also killed many other animals and livestock.

This method eventually failed. Later, the government strictly prohibited the private breeding of rabbits, otherwise they would be severely punished or even face imprisonment. These measures had no effect on the crazy reproduction of wild rabbits, and wild rabbits still wreaked havoc on the Australian land.

So, not only will rabbits bite people when they are pushed to the limit, they will also make a large group of humans unable to survive. If things continue like this, Australia will soon become a place unsuitable for human production. But there is always a way out, and finally a ray of hope appeared.

In the end, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction are effective.

In the 1950s, biologists thought of Pasteur's method of using chicken cholera to eliminate rabbits, but this time the weapon was not chicken cholera bacteria, but the myxoma virus introduced from America. This virus is spread by mosquitoes and is only sensitive and deadly to European wild rabbits, but harmless to humans and other animals.

Soon, the virus showed its effectiveness, with 99% of wild rabbits in some areas killed by the virus. But the virus has a characteristic of gradual weakening, and rabbits also produce antibodies. In addition, the virus is spread by mosquitoes, and there are few mosquitoes in arid areas, so it is difficult to be effective.

As a result, the Australian government introduced a virus that can cause rabbit hemorrhagic disease in 1995. This virus is spread by flies and is also effective against rabbits in arid areas. The disaster caused by rabbits was finally brought under control. However, the rabbits were still not eliminated, and antibodies continued to be produced in the rabbit population. Australian rabbits coexisted with the virus.

The total number of rabbits in Australia now remains at around 600 million, distributed in different regions with different densities.

Just a few years ago, scientists discovered that Australian rabbits carry a natural calicivirus that has a certain immunity to the RHD virus and is harmless to rabbits. This may be a natural vaccine formed by rabbits using poison to fight poison.

Therefore, the war between humans and rabbits is not over yet. Although human beings are powerful, their ability to deal with the punishment of nature is still insufficient or even weak. The only way to avoid it is to follow the laws of nature and not to commit suicide, so as to be better protected from disasters.

Lessons from Australia's rabbit disaster: The dangers of invasive species/

The lesson of the Australian rabbit is the consequence of human beings not following the laws of nature. Under reproductive isolation, species evolution has its own chain and laws. The arrival of an alien species will break this balance and lead to ecological disasters. There are many such examples in the world.

For example, in order to eliminate lake weeds and clean the water, the United States introduced eight species of freshwater fish from Asia, which later became a disaster and seriously endangered the safety of local aquatic plants and animals; the European hairy crab invaded and became a disaster; red-eared sliders and crayfish also became a disaster after coming to China from the Americas.

However, there are many Chinese people, many foodies, and a long history of food culture. Crayfish and red-eared sliders do not seem to have caused much of a stir, but just satisfy people's taste buds. In particular, crayfish has become the most popular midnight snack, making many people put down their phones and chat for a while. If Chinese people did not love the deliciousness of crayfish so much, it would be a bit scary to think about it if they were allowed to reproduce.

In addition to animals, the harm caused by the invasion of alien plants is also serious. For example, China introduced water hyacinth to control water pollution, but its rampant growth not only blocked the river, but also endangered the safety of aquatic animals; the United States began to introduce Chinese kudzu root just to decorate the garden, but later it was cultivated out of control in the wild, occupying and destroying a large amount of farmland and forests.

Nowadays, all countries pay enough attention to species invasion, so there are strict inspection systems for fresh goods crossing the border, animals and plants must be quarantined, and there are strict restrictions on imported species. However, a single mistake can lead to a false alarm, because some invasions are not man-made, especially plant seeds, which can not only fly but also drift. Various birds can also act as "brokers" and bring many seeds across the ocean to the other side.

According to statistics, China has 515 species of invasive alien plants belonging to 72 families and 285 genera, of which 291 species have been confirmed. Among the 100 most threatening alien species in the world announced by the World Conservation Union, 50 have been found in China, making China one of the countries most threatened by alien plant invasions.

There are as many as 6,075 invasive plant species in countries around the world.

Therefore, strictly controlling the invasion of alien species is an arduous task for humans to protect themselves. Can humans eventually maintain the earth's ecology and allow themselves to survive for a long time? How long can they survive in the end? Welcome to discuss, thank you for reading.

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