luong@tonto.DEC (Van Luong Nguyen UHO DTN 264-6560) (07/20/84)
>>Maybe the Australian people should import natural predators (bobcat, lynx, >>hawk..) to control swarms of rabbits and mice which are eating up crops... Your theory that Australia may lack enough natural predators to control those pests appears correct, but the proposed solution of importing predators into the country will probably not work: - Australia is roughly equal in surface area to the USA, so the number of predators needed to spread around the country will run up a gigantic bill both for acquisition and for transport! - despite an abundance of food supply, the predators may not survive long, because one reason why the number of such predators is low in the first place could be that the terrain in the coutryside (flat, dry, treeless...) and the weather (hot, dry) may not be suitable for them. - the imported beasts may also bring with them various diseases to spread to domestic animals (cattle etc...) Let me tell you what the Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) is trying to do around the country to control this problem. They are capturing these pests, destroying the females but sterilizing the males (so that they are still sexually active but cannot reproduce) then return them to their habitat. These males will compete with normal males for sexual favors of the remaining females, and hopefully the effect is enough to shift the ecological balance between natural death rate and reproduction rate to result in an irreversible slide in the pest population Van Luong Nguyen, Digital Equipment Corp.