8/7/2023 0 Comments Rats eating eyeballs“Two years later when I went back, I was wading through an infuriating carpet of seedlings that were taller than me, tripping over piles of coconuts.” While the researchers found a 14-fold increase in seedling biomass, most of these new seedlings were juvenile coconut palms, their proliferation left unchecked by the removal of the rats. “I was on the island in 2012, just after the eradication and could easily navigate through the open jungle understory,” Miller-ter Kuile said. Only they were often not the Pisonia or other native trees that would have been the more ideal forests for the native seabirds and animals of Palmyra. In the years that followed eradication, Palmyra’s understory did indeed fill with juvenile trees as seeds that hit the ground were allowed to take root. The Asian tiger mosquito was wiped out, while two species of land crab emerged, adding to the atoll’s biodiversity.īut rarely is ecology easily untangled. The rats were quick to eat seeds and young plants coming out of the ground, and they frequented the canopy as well, often nesting in the coconut palms and eating coconuts.Įradication of the rats - which was conducted in 2011 - did in fact result in a resurgence of vegetation on Palmyra. “Prior to the eradication, most of the understory of Palmyra was either bare ground - sandy soil or coral rubble - or covered in a carpet of ferns,” said Ana Miller-ter Kuile, a graduate student researcher in the Young Group and lead author of the study. They had plots where they were monitoring trees in various stages of growth and survival how would the vegetation respond to the eradication of the island’s main seed and seedling eater? They had already been visiting Palmyra regularly to track another non-native species - the coconut palm - to see whether it was spreading invasively in the area, potentially impacting the nesting seabird population and changing the island’s soil composition. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy and Island Conservation - were planning to conduct a rat eradication project, UC Santa Barbara community ecologist Hillary Young and her research group saw it as an unusual opportunity. Clearly, managers of island ecosystems need to pay attention to the nuanced consequences of targeted exotic species eradication.” “I could not have imagined the ‘ecological force’ of this prolific invasive seed predatory mammal, nor that in only ten years we’d see such a process of coconut tree mono-dominance. “It is gratifying to see the rewards of long-term monitoring of populations of invasive exotic species,” said study coauthor Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of biology and the Bing Professor in Environmental Science in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. A new study that appears in the journal Biotropica provides new evidence of the fragility of island ecosystems when they are impacted by invasive species-even in locations as remote as the Palmyra Atoll. Omnivorous eating machines, they dined on seabird eggs, native crabs and whatever seed and seedling they could find. Navy during World War II, the rodents, with no natural predators, simply took over. Likely arriving at the remote Pacific islet network as stowaways with the U.S. The black rats weren’t supposed to be there, on Palmyra Atoll.
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