![]() The domestic and wild rabbit genomes mixing on this particular trip from England brewed a gene combination that enabled the animals to explode in numbers once let loose into the vast new land full of food from the new pastoral practices. Eighty days later, on Christmas, two dozen rabbits arrived in Australia – they’d clearly bred on the journey. To make up the number he bought seven grey rabbits that the villagers had kept in hutches, either as pets or to eat,” recalled William’s granddaughter Joan Palmer. It was only with great difficulty that he managed to get six these were half-grown specimens taken from their nests and tamed. ”Wild rabbits were by no means common ‘round Baltonsborough. On October 6, 1859, Thomas’s brother William, who lived at the family estate in Baltonsborough, Somerset, England, sent the 13 rabbits to Australia. ![]() Local lore as well as the historical record trace the origin of Australia’s ‘rabbit plague’ to Thomas Austin, master of the Barwon Park estate Winchelsea, southwest of Melbourne. What happened in and after 1859 to propel these particular wild rabbits into reproductive overdrive? DNA provides the answer. The new genetic analysis reveals that it was specific genes that spawned the fastest colonization rate for an introduced mammal ever recorded. The animals spread 100 kilometers a year for the next half-century, munching their way through native plants and starving the indigenous herbivores and then carnivores that had evolved there over millions of years. Then in 1859 wild rabbits nosed into a shipment of domestics and all hell broke loose. These pets were taken to Sydney, supposedly never released into the wild.Īt least 90 times after that, domestic rabbits came to Australia, but the populations stayed small. Among the 1400 humans were five silver grey domestic bunnies. Historical records trace the pioneer rabbits to 1788, when the First Fleet of 11 ships – six convict transports, three ships of goods, and two Royal Navy vessels – brought the founding European and African settlers from Portsmouth, England, to Botany Bay, New South Wales. But those weren’t the first rabbits – just the first to take over. The rabbit invasion of Australia began with a mixing of genomes – sex – among 13 animals shipped from England in 1859. “The rabbit has, in various times and places, been a treasured pet, a commercial farm animal, a valued subject of the hunt, a major ecological force and an economic pest,” wrote Coman, to which I’d add a valuable model organism in the lab. It’s an interesting mammal, in terms of the relationships to us. Here, we show that despite numerous introductions over a 70-year period, this invasion was triggered by a single release of a few animals that spread thousands of kilometres across the continent,” the researchers write.įeral rabbits – once-domestic animals relocated, where novel behaviors emerge – remain a problem in Australia, where they number more than 150 million. “The colonisation of Australia by the European rabbit is one of the most iconic and devastating biological invasions in recorded history. Their report is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Now researchers from the University of Cambridge and CIBIO Institute in Portugal have wed genetics to history to illuminate the precise source of Australia’s problem. “In Australia, the rabbit has survived drought, fire, flood, diseases, predators, poisons and other stratagems devised by man and remains this country’s most serious vertebrate pest,” wrote Brian Coman in “Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia.” ![]() Over decades, interventions to control their numbers – from rabbit-proof fences to intentional infections with nasty viruses to shooting – have all failed. The animals that have overrun the continent eat almost any plant, their appetites reverberating along food webs, costing an estimated $200 million a year. The rabbits of Australia provide a powerful example of natural selection run amok, favoring a particularly robust mix of domestic and wild traits against an environmental backdrop of plenty of food and a paucity of predators. But the phenomenon of natural selection acting on genetic variants – of viruses or organisms – that have an advantage in a certain place and time is ages old. COVID and monkeypox seem to have come out of nowhere and exploded across continents.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |