When you ask folks what they’d do if given a time machine, the first thing a lot of people say is “before or after killing baby Hitler?”
Just a guess here, but if you ask people from the Gulf Coast for their time travel plans? I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was “I’m getting that motherfucker who brought home a nutria and beating him to death with a soup ladle.”
Today’s Moment of Science… America’s invasive rodents of unusual size.
The semi-aquatic rodent known as the coipú, or the nutria, is also known as a fucking swamp rat. Growing to be up to two feet long and weighing 15-22lbs, they vaguely resemble an orange toothed beaver with a rat’s tail. They carry diseases like tapeworms, liver flukes, tuberculosis, and nematodes, rendering the water they’re backstroking through a hazard for humans to drink or swim in. They’re voracious eaters and when they eat a plant, they’ll often eat it down to the root, wrecking vegetation in their area. A nutria can get pregnant and carry pups to term up to three times per year, and they can carry up to thirteen babies in a litter.
An invasive species that’s a successful breeder with a big appetite? What abject fuckery could possibly happen?
There’s a rumor that the guy who invented tabasco sauce brought the nutria to the US. Nay nay. He was, at best, just one of the idiots who released his entire farm of them into the wild.
In the late 1880s, nutria were brought up here from Argentina to be farmed for the booming fur industry. However, as the industry declined, so did the nutria’s usefulness in its new environment. As we’ve learned from watching Australia’s itsy rabbit issue, it doesn’t take many rodents in the wild for a massive problem to breed itself into existence.
The nutria remained popular for its fur through the 1980s, dropping off precipitously through the 1990s. As this happened, the wild nutria population boomed, and damage from the creatures skyrocketed. In the early 2000s, after weighing a few options, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries decided their best plan of attack was to pay people a bounty to round up the little fuckers.
It apparently worked for Australia and their emus. So.
However, what was once just an issue in the Gulf Coast is now an issue all over the country. The intrepid swamp rat has been found in thirty states now, and is well established in eighteen of them. Along with Louisiana, control and eradication campaigns have been undertaken by California and several states affected by the Chesapeake Bay infestation. They’ve had varying degrees of success.
We’re likely never going to eradicate the nutria from the United States. Maybe it’ll be better managed in years to come, but we’re stuck with each other.
So in the meantime, we’re doing the most American thing possible: serving up hot buttered swamp rat.
Along with paying people to trap the nutria, some are making a valiant attempt to turn it into an animal we accept as food. As you do. It apparently tastes like turkey (dark meat, specifically) and goes great in a jambalaya.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, looking forward to the new American tradition of roast swamp rat for Thanksgiving one day.
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