Start at the bottom for landscape recovery

The continuing ecological recovery of Macquarie Island demonstrates the effectiveness of starting at the bottom of the food web to generate landscape health. An initial focus on feral cats triggered a boom in rabbit and rat populations. Eliminating rabbits, rats and mice paved the way for predator removal and triggered a revival in vegetative habitat […]

Rat Spill – an invasive species case study

A tiny Alaskan island faces a threat as deadly as an oil spill – rats. However, ‘biological spills’ can be much worse than oil spills, because they don’t necessarily diminish over time. Biological pollution can adapt, self-propagate and spread, says Professor Anthony Ricciardi from McGill University, Montreal. Interesting to think of invasive species, like wild […]