‘Complacency crept in’: Australia defenceless against feral rabbit boom
Lack of research and development funding has left Australia without its key weapon against exponential growth of one of the most devastating pests.
Rabbit numbers are booming, but unlike three previous plagues of the marauding pests since the 1950s, Australia does not have a virus it can release to rein in the exploding numbers, a leading cause of environmental damage and agricultural losses.
Steady rainfall over the past two years has fuelled growth of the vegetation rabbits need to breed their litters.
Rabbit populations are booming in rural and urban areas.
Rabbits can birth litters as often as once a month, and as those surviving kits mature and start breeding, it triggers the kind of exponential growth that creates populations so vast and widespread that experts warn devastating ecological damage is inevitable.
Rabbits change entire landscapes by eating all the green vegetation and outcompeting native animals for food, digging burrows that cause soil erosion and damage waterways. The federal government has calculated rabbits cause about $250 million in lost agricultural production a year.
Since 1950, Australia has deployed three viruses deadly to rabbits, known as a biocontrol, to quickly cut rabbit numbers. It typically takes the rabbit population about 10 years to adapt to the disease and after that, numbers start to rise once more.
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The most recent biocontrol, a strain of calicivirus, was released in 2017.
Centre for Invasive Species Solutions national rabbit coordinator Heidi Kleinert says: “We are seeing a boom in populations in locations spread across the country.”
She says rabbits are flourishing in farming areas and outer suburban areas as well.
“Their population growth is being driven by the food available, given rabbits are triggered to breed by regular growth of green vegetation that has been available for some time now,” Kleinert says.
Australia’s top science agency the CSIRO released the world’s first vertebrate pest biocontrol in 1950, in a desperate bid to quell the rabbit plague.
That virus, known as myxomatosis or myxo, was extremely effective and killed around 99.8 per cent of infected rabbits and it took until the 1990s for rabbits to adapt and breed again in plague-like proportions.
Since then, two strains of the calicivirus have been released into the wild, in 1995 and 2017, both of which cut rabbit numbers dramatically. But each time rabbits bounced back. Now, due to lack of funding, there is no deadly virus ready to release into the wild and scientists say that there is not enough funding to develop the next biocontrol for rabbits.