Feo: Plague of Locusts Swarms Outback Towns
Posted by Feo Amante on Mar 18, 2004 at 11:03
(216.31.142.59)Re: Plague of Locusts Swarms Outback Towns (Uncle Al)
I don't have to remember back. Mouse plagues are a re-occurring problem in some parts of Australia as well as some parts of California.
The causes aren't fully known but mainly revolve around the fact that farmers move into an area where mice are already in abundance, then, after a really good rain and the planting of the mice's favorite food - like grain - around the time of their breeding season, they go bananas and reproduce like, crazy man!
The high populations of mice - which can be as high as 3000 per hectare - eventually die off when the food is gone, social stress from high population causes fights to the death, starvation, and predation. Not all the variables of their breeding and their die-offs are known.
But their explosions are caused by human intervention in their environment. In this case, the farming/planting of grain which matures during mouse breeding season.
Far better than poisoning the mice, which in turn poisons the soil - which makes for very expensive environmental clean-ups before planting crops - is to pratice prevention.
This page gives more info.
Poisoning the land that grows your food is not the answer, only a desperate last resort when better methods are ignored.
Natural predators won't eat the hundreds of thousands of poisoned corpses. They have to be cleaned up before they rot and put the poison into the farm field. They are useless as fertilizer.
Seems the best method in the future (now that more is known about the situation) is to take humans out of the equation by moving them off the farm, and let natural causes take care of the problem for the farmers. When they return, they'll have extensive damage, but they won't go bankrupt or suck up tax dollars ridding their fields of poison in time for the next planting and harvest. Plus what mouse bodies - and excrement left by predators - remain makes damn good fertilizer!