World’s largest rodents are taking on a elaborate gated group in Argentina

Capybaras feed on grass near a main road in the Nordelta residential complex, north of Buenos Aires, on August 26. (Image credit: STRINGER / AFP via Getty Images)

Residents in a residential complex in Argentina struggle to get along with some unruly new neighbors: hundreds of the largest rodents in the world.

Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), also known as Carpinchos, have been proliferating for weeks in Nordelta, an affluent neighborhood north of Buenos Aires that is home to around 40,000 people. Local residents have reported that the sturdy rodents, which can grow to be over 1.2 meters long and weigh up to 79 kilograms, pooped in gardens, destroyed flower beds, caused traffic accidents and allegedly bite domestic dogs. Although capybaras are not known to be aggressive towards people or pets, according to the Argentine newspaper La Nacion.

However, environmentalists say the capybaras do not invade the northern delta, but rather reclaim their home from the multi-million dollar development that occurred in the late 1990s in ecologically important wetlands around the banks of the Paraná River, the second largest river in South America.

Related: 15 of the largest animals of their kind on earth

“It’s the other way around: Nordelta has invaded the Carpinchos ecosystem,” Enrique Viale, a well-known Argentine environmental lawyer, told the Guardian. “Wealthy government-sponsored real estate developers need to destroy nature in order to sell their customers the dream of living in the wilderness,” he added, “because the buyers of these homes want nature, but without mosquitoes, snakes or carpinchos.”

A resident walks past water pigs in Nordelta on August 26th. (Image credit: STRINGER / AFP via Getty Images)

Capybaras never completely disappeared from the North Delta after the community was completed, but their population declined due to habitat loss and the disruption caused by construction. Now, after decades without natural predators like jaguars, their population is rising again, with a 17% increase last year. There are currently around 400 capybaras roaming the Nordelta, but experts believe the population could eventually reach around 3,000 at the current speed, according to La Nacion.

Nordelta residents want officials to remove capybaras from the settlement and introduce new measures to prevent the rodents from roaming freely in the 1,214-acre community – for example by adding reinforced hedges and fences, La Nacion said. Some locals have also threatened to shoot the capybaras, although none have been killed so far, according to The Guardian.

In response, environmental activists protested in Nordelta last week, with many wearing mascot-style cardboard capybara headgear, urging the government to protect the capybaras and allow them to remain in their once natural habitat, according to La Nacion.

The capybaras have also become popular with the Argentine public, particularly in Buenos Aires, as many poorer people see them as a symbol of a class struggle against the city’s elite, who have destroyed an important ecosystem to separate themselves from poorer communities, so The guard.

Nordelta, for example, has changed the natural drainage systems of the wetlands and regularly causes flooding in the surrounding communities. “When there are extreme weather events, it’s the poorer surrounding neighborhoods that are flooded,” Viale told The Guardian. “As always, it is the poor who end [up] pay the price. “

Some experts believe that due to backlash from environmentalists and poorer communities, residents of North Delta are having to get used to their new neighbors rather than removing them.

“Nordelta is an exceptionally rich wetland that should never have been touched,” said Sebastian di Martino, biologist and nature conservation director of the Rewilding Argentina Foundation, the French news agency AFP. “Now that the damage is done, residents need to achieve some level of coexistence with the carpinchos.”

Originally published on Live Science.