These pets were taken to Sydney, supposedly never released into the wild. 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. Is the Genetic Literacy Project a corporate ‘front’? GLP responds to ongoing false allegations from US Right to Know / Organic Consumers Association / SourceWatch / Baum Hedlund / Church of ScientologyĬOVID and monkeypox seem to have come out of nowhere and exploded across continents.GLP Integrity Policies: Privacy, Conflicts of Interest, Verification, Fact-Checking Standards and Corrections.Mission, Financial Transparency and Governance.
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