Mice Plague in Australia Continues to Wreak Havoc Attributable to Exploding Inhabitants of Rodents

Julie Leven and her husband Des brought their RV just before Christmas last year to visit their son in northern New South Wales, Australia. As they drove back to their house in Gilgandra, about 430 kilometers northwest of Sydney, at night, they noticed masses of white dots moving across the black pavement. They immediately discovered that the dots were mice.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Nice presentation of a totally disgusting story: Australia’s apocalyptic mouse plague

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When the Levens got to their home, they saw a scene of rodent slaughter. Mice had attacked their house in such great numbers that it had become uninhabitable.

The critters had eaten their way into the pantry and destroyed everything they could get at. Their feces and rotten urine were strewn from one end of the house to the other over the upholstered furniture and beds. The rats had even eaten the insulation around the motor cables of two tractors, destroying the bundles of hay they had collected.

Invasive outbreak

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Outbreaks of this invasive species are not uncommon in Australia. “We have data from the 1900s that essentially shows that mouse plagues occur in Australia every four or five years, and every seven or ten years anywhere,” says Peter Brown, ecologist at CSIRO in Canberra, on vertebrate pests examined. But then again, farmers tell Brown that this is the biggest mouse epidemic they have ever seen.

Related article: Woman wakes up to a mouse gnawing her eyeballs as Australian mouse plague worsens

rainfall

The main cause is believed to be excess food due to a wet and rainy summer. After many years of severe drought culminating in the terrible 2019-2020 bushfires, eastern Australia experienced abundant rain for much of 2020, particularly in agricultural regions. Mice are opportunistic eaters who consume virtually anything, but grain offers the most attractive premium.

Rainfall is one of the most important predictors of mouse populations, according to Brown. “Our models rely on rainfall as a proxy for food availability because if it’s a good year for growing crops, it’s a good year for all sorts of other things mice eat,” he adds.

population

Population surveys from September to November 2020 – the springtime in the southern hemisphere – showed that mouse activity was increasing rapidly. Catching – specifically examining captured female mice for scars from past pregnancies that may indicate fertility – and mouse chewing cards, which are tiny squares of paper soaked in rapeseed oil that researchers hand out to mice to gnaw at, are used to track this . The higher the mouse activity is at a certain point, the more is chewed when collecting the cards.

“We kept an eye on what was going on in different regions last spring and summer last year, and northern and western New South Wales were starting to become a hot zone of activity,” says Brown.

Agricultural damage

Over the summer, mouse populations exploded causing significant agricultural damage, for which the state government pledged A $ 150 million to help farmers cope with the attack.

Mouse plague

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The house mouse (Mus musculus) arrived in Australia with British colonists at the end of the 18th century, has quickly established itself in local ecosystems and poses a threat to native species. “In Australia, competition with introduced rodents is one of the risks for native rodents “Says Emily Roycroft, evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University in Canberra. “It is generally quite difficult for the ecosystem to obtain more than one species that is comparable in this way when living things are consuming similar foods and are of similar height,” adds Roycroft.

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