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Winston
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Danmark
Mar 1999
time: 06:37
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quote:
Mice gang up on endangered birds
Attacks on albatrosses seem to be a learned behaviour.
On one of the Earth's most remote islands, mice have learned, and are apparently teaching each other, how to attack and kill bird chicks that are 200 times their size.
Far from exulting in the cleverness of mice, the researchers who discovered this want to eradicate the rodents from the island in order to save endangered albatrosses.
Biologists on Gough Island, a speck in the Atlantic between the southern tips of Africa and South America, first learned of the problem when they found that tristan albatrosses (Diomedea dabbenena) were losing their chicks at an extremely high rate: up to 80% were dying.
Researchers suspected that house mice, which were accidentally introduced to the island, might be the culprits. So husband-and-wife team Ross Wanless and Andrea Angel spent a year on the island videotaping birds' nests and collecting data.
Pick on someone your own size
The videos confirm that mice are taking on the chicks, biting them over and over until they die from loss of blood or infection. Wanless, an invasive-species biologist from the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, vividly recalls watching the first videos. "It was carnage. Chicks half alive, with massive gaping wounds and guts hanging out."
The mice are able to defeat the much larger birds by biting the same spot over and over (see video). They take advantage of the fact that the birds, which have evolved in an area that has been without land predators for millions of years, have no defensive response against such attacks.
The results were presented this week at the annual meeting for the Society for Conservation Biology in Brasília, Brazil.
Trained killers
Wanless was surprised by the results. Such behaviour is unprecedented in mice, he says. And, oddly, the attacks only take place on some of the island's peaks, despite the fact that the mice live everywhere on the island.
The research duo chose two sites for further inspection that had radically different death rates for chicks. They found the same vegetation, altitude, slope, numbers of mice and albatross nests at each site. But one group of mice attacked chicks and the other did not. From this the team infers that the attack is a learned behaviour.
The transmission of learned skills from one generation to the next is a relatively rare phenomenon, and not one seen in mice in the wild before. The researchers note that it is particularly surprising in this case because only a few mice from each brood would be expected to live through a winter.
Wanless and Angel are now determined to save the albatrosses by removing the mice. But they warn that similar attacks might be threatening other bird species.
"This is probably not unique to Gough," says Wanless. "It is just that nobody has looked." |
Article from news(at)nature.com. And here's the link to the video, which I myself can't get to work, maybe others will have better luck. It's 10 MB in size.
So did the dreaded killer rabbit somehow serve as an inspiration to these murderous mice, or is it just that baby albatros tastes like chicken? We may never know for sure..
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OzzyKP
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Rockville, MD
Oct 1999
time: 00:37
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I agree, let the mice stay. This is a facinating development.
As for the fact that they were introduced by man and thus "unnatural" BS. Man, as has been said, is a part of the world's ecosystem, and since our very first emergence in the jungles of Africa we have been affecting the environment around us. This is actually natural.
If we attempted to revert every change we've made to animals and plants over our long history the planet would be unrecognizable. We should just eliminate all dogs and cats, creatures we've created and customized over centuries. All the crops and farm animals that our ancestors brought with them as they migrated from place to place.
Heck, the "native" americans aren't native here either, we should demand that all people in north and south america leave. Indian and European alike. Plus take back horses and wheat, and everything else.
It is ridiculous to try and seperate us from nature. We ARE nature. As Che said, we are just better at it than everyone else.
Of course we should be careful from here on out on how we introduce plants/animals into non-native environments, but its too late to backtrack.
Our attempts to "fix" the environment can cause more problems than fixes. Like our attempts to stop forest fires in the United States. Forests are supposed to burn down. They are quick, take out the underbrush, and give the old trees more chances to grow. By stopping the fires we are creating more underbrush, so eventually a fire does occur that catches to quick, and too intense and we can't stop it. Thus it takes down all the old trees, and some of our homes as well. But, but, some of those fires were started by campers, they are unnatural and must be stopped! No. We usually make an even bigger mess when we try to help. Just do our best not to screw things up in the first place, but if an accident happens, just leave it alone (unless its an oil spill or toxic waste dump or something major of course).
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Traianvs
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Belgium, land of plenty (corruption)
Jan 2000
time: 06:37
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Uhm you're right about the underbrush fires, but very often they're big fires that demolish the entire forest instead of the underbrush. If you can't do something about that a lot of land will be laid waste, and nature will not be able to recover that easily.
They're not "natural" fires so they shouldn't be there; nature is not prepared for those. In fact nature isn't prepared for us humans either, I'd rather have a few billion of us removed but well that won't happen anyway
I think you have no idea of what you're talking about Ozzy. Exotics can devastate nature when released in an entirely different environment. If you say that because they are alive and organic'n stuff, this means they are nature then you're just wrong. Nature is all about balance; if one species is starting to dominate like modern humans, nature as a whole is ****ed up, species not accustomed to the exotics will be powerless, and all the plants/animals etc that have a symbiotic or other relation to the animals that are being outcompeted will face the same consequences. It's a domino effect that is hard to stop. It's not because there are some trees and some birds that you can call that 'nature'
Besides, there's hardly a way that a colony of exotics could travel thousands of kilometres, oceans etc to settle down in completely unknown territory. That just doesn't happen. Saying animals should simply die because they are defenseless against imported species is a mind-boggingly stupid thing to say.
Nature is very fragile, even though there are many possibilities for it to keep the balance, but if the **** hits the fan, then it's hard to go back to a more healthier situation (an unbalanced nature situation is bad for just about.. everyone living in it, except possibly humans because they can import everything they need and have fewer direct relations with nature anymore)
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Lancer
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Oregon Coast, USA! or Bohol, Philippines!
Apr 1999
time: 05:37
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Give the island to the French for nuke testing. This will get rid of the mice for attacking the birds, and the birds for being too stupid to live.
Actually I'm on the side of the birds on this one, and though I doubt mice can be eradicated from the island, I'm in favor of massive tax increases to try.
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Geronimo
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st cloud USA
Jan 1970
time: 05:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Traianvs
In fact nature isn't prepared for us humans either, I'd rather have a few billion of us removed but well that won't happen anyway
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What good do all these human extinction advocates think would come of our removal from the planet? The individual animals on the planet would be just as miserable overall without us as they are with us. Nature has no value except that which we choose to give to it, or which other individual creatures give to it. What evidence do you have that if we were gone other creatures would find the world more preferable in our absence?
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