Camels May Overrun Australia Outback

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

From Camels May Overrun Australia Outback:

Australia is now home to around 500,000 camels roaming the country’s vast tracts of desert, said Glenn Edwards, a senior scientist for the Northern Territory provincial government.Camels were first introduced to Australia in the mid-1800s to transport goods across the desert.

When trucks and trains made the beasts of burden unneeded, their owners simply turned them loose.

With no natural predators and ample grazing land, the camel population has exploded in parts of central, northern and western Australia, and could exceed 1 million in the next decade, Edwards said.

“The feral camel population is growing by about 10 percent each year and doubling in size every eight years,” Edwards said in a statement. “These camels feed on more than 80 percent of the available plant species in the area they inhabit and have serious impacts on vegetation.”

As the article points out, “Australia has a history of infestations by animals from overseas”:

Rabbits brought from Europe swarmed across parts of the Outback and noxious cane toads brought from South America to control bugs in sugar cane fields are now spreading across the north, killing native wildlife from snakes to small crocodiles that eat them.

Comments

  1. Harold says:

    I don’t know why, but when I read the article at the following link I thought of you: Why They Lost The Wheel. I leave the link as a comment to this post as it seems as good a place as any.

  2. Madera Verde says:

    If left to their own devices would camels displace kangaroos? I had thought kangaroos were a pest species for similar reasons. Seems like there is a big giant vacuum in the Australian ecology that nature is ahboring big time.

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