Wascally Wabbits: The Rabbit-Proof Fence That's Sealing Off Australia

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mega projects or just click the link below and let's get into today's video [Music] when a population grows really really quickly producing young at rapid rates and overall numbers skyrocket out of control we know precisely how to describe the situation we say that the thing whatever it is is breeding like rabbits to convey this idea of unchecked growth for most of us that concept is simply a metaphor we've got tucked away ready to use whenever we need it when the metaphor itself becomes a real life issue though then we can have big problems cut to australia in the early 20th century when quickly multiplying rabbits was anything but a metaphorical situation australia's rabbit infestation spiraled so out of control that the public works department of australia had to build huge fences to curb this activity now you might be thinking that gigantic thousands of kilometer long fences to keep adorable rabbits away might seem like an overreaction but this is anything but so let's talk about the realities of having far too many rabbits hopping around eating our vegetation and changing the local ecosystem and well then you decide we'll start in the before times when australia's rabbit population was underwhelming one newly settled english colonist took issue with that and well the rest is history [Music] the first european rabbits came to australia when the first europeans did in the first fleet in may of 1787 11 ships departed from england and headed to australia to form the initial penal colony of new south wales that first fleet consisted of a few civil officers and marines a good quantity of supplies and between a thousand and one thousand five hundred convicts somewhere on their boat hidden in a corner there must have been a small family of rabbits as well new south wales set up its new southern hemisphere life happily so two did the stowaway rabbits for about 80 years humans and rabbits lived together in peace in fact the australians caught and bred the rabbits for food occasionally they used their tiny hides to line shoes or mittens judging by analyses of australian colonial food remains it wouldn't appear that the rabbits were especially numerous by the 1820s that began to change one contemporary newspaper noted that the common rabbit is becoming so numerous that they are running about on some large estates by thousands this seems overwhelming but at the time new south wales wasn't yet concerned one new south wales resident was still remarking on the ideal conditions for breeding more rabbits in 1827 writing rabbits are bred around houses but we have yet no wild ones in enclosures then the idea of rabbits shortly taking over the continent might have seemed to us like the prospect of an angry horde of chihuahuas roaming the globe it just didn't seem likely or well particularly problematic in the 1840s people were still breeding rabbits for food their numbers may have been starting to grow slowly records from new south wales courts show that rabbit theft was increasingly common the main event though that triggered out of control rabbit growth happened in 1859 [Music] so it's 1859 property owner thomas austin who has just moved to australia decided that he missed hunting in england it often dedicated his weekends to shooting rabbits he wasn't able to do this in his new home so thomas wrote to his nephew william back in england to send him a specified list of game twelve grey rabbits five hairs 72 partridges and some sparrows he wrote the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home in addition to a spot of hunting unfortunately william wasn't able to find enough gray rabbits to fulfill his uncle's order so he sent over a larger number of domestic rabbits hoping that it would make up the difference it would seem however that austin wasn't very good at hunting the native population of australian rabbits skyrocketed out of control by the mid-1860s by 1866 a newspaper reported that some 50 000 rabbits had been killed by hunters which failed to make any dent in the rising population so how was this happening well the rabbits were just multiplying like rabbits european rabbits are known for producing large amounts of offspring they can also start to reproduce when they're very young they tend to have four litters per year each with two to five kits this results in a lot of rabbits very very quickly and here's the other thing australia was the perfect place for a rabbit population to explode australia has mild winters which meant that rabbits could breed the entire year the widespread farming happening at the time leveled forest and scrubling places which would have been difficult for rabbits to nest in into fields with low vegetation which is a rabbit's paradise [Music] too much of anything perhaps especially rabbits is a problem the havoc rabbits were wreaking on australia's ecology was devastating now how did they do this well primarily through over grazing and reducing the availability of natural resources for indigenous species rabbits reduced natural pasta vegetation first and then ate away woody vegetation such as small shrubs and the bark of small trees this decimated australia's natural flora upon which australia's natural fauna was dependent rabbits also caused serious erosion problems they ate away australia's plants which left the topsoil exposed when winds swept across australia's plains followed by driving rains that topsol wore away no topsoil makes it very hard to regrow any of the vegetation lost to rabbits or promote any type of commercial agriculture something australia was trying very hard to do at this time farmers started to suffer huge problems as the number of rabbits continued to grow they started building individual fences to ensure that the rabbits couldn't reach their personal crops farmers also dedicated a lot of time to destroying rabbit warrens or the underground tunnels that rabbits create through burrowing by 1887 losses from rabbit damage compelled the new south wales government to offer 25 000 pounds nearly 2 million pounds in 2021 for any method of success not previously known in the colony for the effectual extermination of rabbits the result of their investigation well they'd noticed the success of the small fences and they decided let's just do that but on a very grand scale now this wasn't the first time that australia had decided to build an absolutely massive fence before australia's rabbit population spiraled out of control the continent had a dingo problem these wild dogs regularly attacked sheep and cattle stations and in one year alone they lost over 11 000 sheep due to dingo attacks in 1885 australia completed construction on a wire mesh fence to keep dingoes away from key sheep stations keeping half a consonant of industrious dingoes out of these stations required a lot of fence there are sheep and cattle stations in australia that are larger than some small countries the dingo fence is one of the longest structures in the world stretching 5 614 kilometers or 3488 miles now the dingo events had worked to an extent armed with this president australian construction workers broke ground on a new rabbit proof fence in 1901. its primary goal was to keep rabbits out of western australia the fence ended up being formed of three smaller fences combined running for 2023 mars or 3256 kilometers it took six years to build and the cost per kilometer offense was 250 australian dollars or 19 000 australian dollars in today's money in 1907 at the time of the fence's completion its longest stretch was 1139 miles or 1833 kilometers and it was the longest unbroken fence in the world australia's rabbit fence was made out of many things for the most part it consisted of posts made out of local wood such as salmon gum tea tree and mulga spaced a few meters apart in between each post was barbed wire or wire netting but wood was scarce construction workers used iron they tried to minimize this though as iron is really heavy and whenever they couldn't use what was locally on hand the workers had to haul in materials from often hundreds of kilometers away by bullock mule or camel as the project drew to a close in 1907 it was primarily under the supervision of the public works department of western australia and one man in particular richard john ankertel anchatel's workforce consisted of 120 men 350 camels 210 horses and 41 donkeys when the project transitioned from construction of the fence to maintaining the fence a man named alexander crawford took over even though the fence was already built crawford's job was far from easy in fact maintaining the fence is when the troubles really started [Music] crawford employed four sub-inspectors each of whom was responsible for 500 miles or 800 kilometers of fence under these four worked 25 boundary riders these 30 men had a big job in front of them remember this was the very early 20th century we didn't have very many ways to reliably or quickly communicate long distance and we certainly didn't have cctv to provide remote monitoring in order to make sure that the fence did its job keeping huge numbers of insidious pests away from australia's dwindling natural resources people from australia's defense protection squad had to set eyes on the fence themselves this meant that crawford's team had to figure out a way to travel up and down 3256 kilometers of fence pretty frequently to do this they experimented with several modes of transportation they began with bicycles but they found that this quickly wore out the maintenance workers quickly the boundary riders upgraded their rides to camels while this was much easier on their legs it proved very difficult for their necks the camels were taller than the rabbit fence and peering downward to assess potential damage didn't really work for the boundary riders either in 1910 the team leveled up their maintenance transportation again purchasing a car to inspect the fence but unfortunately this didn't work either the car's tires were just no match for the rugged rocky ever-changing australian terrain the tires were always punctured very easily eventually the team settled on a novel idea each maintenance team got a sled consisting of a buck board buggy tied to two camels the makeshift vehicle carried two increasingly uncomfortable maintenance workers sand surfing alongside the rabbit fence for miles and miles and while must have been the bumpiest maintenance route of all time between their assistance as pack animals during the construction phase and their integral role pulling bark boards for maintenance there are those who believe that it would have been impossible to build the fence without the use of camels after the sub-inspectors and boundary riders had figured this all out crawford still had to complete his own job his job was to eliminate in real time any rabbits that managed to breach the fence in other words he set out each morning to play a real-life high-stakes version of whack-a-mole unfortunately the state of the fence made this necessary in just the first year following completion of the fence a large number of rabbit colonies were found and eliminated on the wrong side of the fence the australian rabbit fence was a major topic of cultural interest at the time serving as the inspiration for many books and later movies comics and jokes lightly roasting the fence appeared in australian newspapers quite often with one highly circulating comic hinting that well of course the rabbits were finding ways to breach the friends the critters were using it as a government-sponsored net for their games of rabbit tennis hilarious joke from the past there not after a while crawford's team had to face the truth the fence wasn't working as well as they'd hoped fences work really well in theory but they must be regularly maintained they're perfect for small scale solutions but over thousands of kilometers constantly subject to weather conditions and extremely industrious pests these walls just couldn't do a 100 effective job unfortunately rabbits and their intensely packed breeding schedule demand 100 efficiency eliminate 95 percent and the remaining few will repopulate very quickly there's also the idea that perhaps these fences would doom to begin with since building them took a very long time remember all construction materials had to be brought to site by camelback rabbits were almost always able to bypass the line of the fence as it was being constructed leading to equal numbers of rabbits on either side of the fence almost as soon as it was completed one comment to put it this way at best the long barrier fences merely delayed the spread of rabbits into new country so it was time to come up with a new plan [Music] a physical fence can break down and particularly creative rabbits can burrow deep or leap through holes in the 1950s the government tried another solution they teamed up with australian scientists to release another wave of rabbits into the wild but this group of rabbits leapt into the bushland carrying the myoxima myoxmavirus a specific viral strain that only affects rabbits this massive experiment was the first time scientists ever purposefully introduced a virus into the wild to eradicate an entire species one australian scientist said thus inadvertently began one of the great experiments in natural selection conducted on a continental scale the rabbids who were infected came down with a disease called myxomatosis this condition quickly killed many rabbits then perhaps due to how quickly they breed the rabbits quickly became immune to the myaxma virus so the scientists started to work on something else that something else was rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus or rhdb in the 1980s scientists began to use it cautiously in a very controlled manner to reduce the still rampaging rabbit population rhdv is an rna virus transmitted by flies it kills rabbits 48 hours after initial infection for a decade or so the scientists saw slight but promising results then in 1995 the rhdv virus escaped a quarantined facility seriously decimating the amount of rabbits in the wild it was calculated that rhdv lowered rabbit numbers in australia by 90 percent however rabbits that lived in areas where there weren't a lot of flies gradually began to develop a resistance to rhdb scientists began to realize that they were seeing a pattern evolution and the incredibly fast breeding pattern of rabbits would make it very difficult for any rabbit-specific disease to wipe out the pests entirely before at least some of them became immune so they tend to poison instead using aerial bait drops of a chemical called sodium fluoroacetate scientists were able to kill off entire colonies of rabbits using carbon monoxide and phosphine they were also able to fumigate underground rabbit warrants instantly killing any rabbits who were breeding or burrowing inside however huge chemical drops over large sections of australia's wildlife just wasn't good for the environment today australia's scientists have several solutions that they know sort of work but we also know that without a perfect solution rabbits will bounce back more quickly than we can get rid of them [Music] because there's really no such thing as a perfect solution to get rid of australia's rabbits yet the current priorities focus a lot on pairing research physical boundaries and viral agents to get the best bang for rabbit-proofing buck for example current projects include studying isolating and producing more effective rhdv strains identifying other biocontrol potentials that may work better with less of an ecological impact such as possibly laporade herpes virus iv a virus that has recently swept across north america killing many commercial and pet rabbits establishing lots of very local natural resource management groups staffed with passionate australian citizens who have a deep knowledge of their surrounding terrain helping specific landowners build their own smaller easier to maintain fences and equipping them with safe types of rabbit poison so that they can each protect their own parcels of land strategically working to support the populations of native rabbit predators such as feral cats and foxes locating and destroying rabbit warrens and burrows with poison and fire it's a lot of stuff that's going on and the big question is has it been worth it we're going on 120 years of often expensive and sometimes dangerous rabbit management and we haven't yet arrived at a solution fortunately researchers have been monitoring the benefits of the continent's efforts to curb the rabbit population even though they've not yet been 100 successful there have been huge gains for example researchers have found that australia's agricultural industry saw economic benefits totaling upwards of 43 billion dollars from 1950 to 1995 just due to the use of maoximavirus the advent of rh tv in 1995 and the use of bio controls together saved australia's agriculture another 14 billion dollars through 2011. we can also see the environmental benefits of rabbit bio control while we haven't been able to eliminate them over the entire continent tiny wildlife preserves where 100 rabbit removal has been accomplished are even flourishing today australia's rabbit-proof fence may not have worked as well as the government hoped but it still stands as a first line of defense in protecting australia's vibrant ecosystems for now we watch and we wait ready for success with a future less permeable fence perhaps one reliant on strategic bio controls and strong community action instead of just wire and wood so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do smash that like button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 157,446

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Id: UZ66Vh4rDv8

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021