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Australia to cull 2 million feral cats
The federal government has pledged to reduce the nation's feral cat population by a third between now and 2020.
Scientists are criticising the Australian government for its $11 million plan to unleash herpes on its carp population.
The plan could lead to "catastrophic ecosystem crashes" and "constitutes a serious risk to global food security", researchers Jackie Lighten and Cock van Oosterhout warned in a letter published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution Journal.
Australia has a serious carp problem. European carp were imported for fish farming in the 1850s, but some were accidentally released into the wild in the 1960s. Since then, their population has exploded and now millions are clogging key river arteries. The fish now constitute about 80 per cent of the aquatic biomass in the Murray River and the Murray-Darling Basin. They're destroying the ecosystem and starving out native wildlife in the process, costing an estimated $500 million a year in economic impact.
Last year, the Turnbull government announced a new strategy to eliminate the fishy pest: releasing a strain of carp herpes into the wild to let the virus thin out the population.
It estimated that releasing a strain of carp herpes that leaves other native wildlife unharmed would wipe out 95 per cent of the European carp population over the next 30 years. Then science minister Christopher Pyne said it would unleash "Carpageddon" on the pest species.
But Lighten and van Oosterhout warn there's a high risk of the herpes strain spreading from Australia into the world's oceans and harming other species in the long term. And in the short term, if the virus does its job, Australia will have to deal with "millions of tons" of dead carp decomposing its waterways, crashing the already fragile ecosystem in addition to probably making half of Australia smell really awful for a long time. And it may not even work, they warn, because of how fertile carp are; a single female carp can lay 10 million eggs a year - far more than rabbits in Australia or cats on South Africa's Marion Island fought with viruses before.
The government plans to release the carp herpes virus in 2018.
The Washington Post