A severe mouse plague is overwhelming towns north-east of Perth, with residents describing roads covered in mice and infestations in homes and businesses.
Locals and farmers say current baits are ineffective and are calling for urgent approval to use stronger rodent poisons — a bureaucratic process that is dragging on.
The local MP says in the meantime, people are leaving town.
nightmare fuel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6xNYLIUeY
Apparently this is a regular thing in Australia, when I searched ‘mouse plague Perth’ I got videos from 2 weeks ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 5 years ago…
Reminded me of the current xkcd.
Implications of the age of the posts when you google “mouse plague Perth”
I’ve seen news like this ever since I was a child
I saw a video on some news show in the 90’s about a occurrence in Australia.
Seems like a bad time to have a Hanta virus outbreak and a mouse plague!
Fortunately for now it seems very unlikely for Hanta virus to spread to this region.
I’ve got to wonder if poison is the only option but it certainly seems like it given the sheer scale of the mouse plague.
Unfortunately poisoning this many mice in such a wide area will undoubtedly lead to wider ecosystem casualties to creatures who feed on live mice and carion.
This can be mitigated by using poisons that break down while doing their job and are only effective at specific dosage to bodyweight such that they naturally dillute while killing mice, but since the mice will eat each other that also means they will build resistance to it very quickly.
The most ideal solution would be a mass sterilization, such as catching and spaying almost all the females, castrating the males, causing them to outcompete themselves for food and shrink dramatically in population.
Barring that, a better solution to poison is to trick them into falling into a container, this works well with buckets and then they can be sorted and disposed of later.
I don’t see how TNR is viable when a town is overrun with mice. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of “surgeries” on animals that have fleeting life spans. And these mice infestations are tens of millions of animals. I did hysterectomies on lab rats during college so I know that it’s not a very long process, but a rat is also 4x bigger than a mouse and it seems needlessly cruel to put an invasive pest animal through a traumatic surgery for essentially no gain.
For the females, it’s definitely fighting a flood with a bucket, but it’s better than doing nothing.
If you grab a bucket of males and a little hand tool that expands and retract to quickly rubber band their balls you could probably knock out up to 90 an hour on average if you spend 40s prepping a new band and strapping it on each mouse, but it’s less effective because only 1 male is enough to copulate with many females, but at least it robs food from viable males and females. This might be really optimistic though, theres a chance the mice could gnaw the band off. EDIT: a hot iron clamp would probably work better…
If you know of a more effective approach feel free to present it, but clearly the poison tactic isn’t going to work when they’ve already established themselves and reached this number.
Who doesn’t like bubble wrap?
😖😬😩
Is it bad if I wanted a video of that part? Bubble wrap is so fun
It’d be like a car going over a cattle grid… but with the blood n gut pops.
Yes, I feel sorry for the local mechanics who need to change the oil on a vehicle that has a layer of dried, rotting viscera all over the undercarriage.
This feels like the mammal equivalent of a mast year
Aren’t there supposed to be tons of feral cats in Australia? Or did the rodent poisons kill them off?
It’ll be fine. We’ll introduce snakes to kill the excess cats. Then we’ll release mongeese to take care of the excess snakes. Then we’ll use hawks for the mongoose. And then we just all move underground to avoid all the killer hawks.
There are too many feral cats but people really underestimate how bad a mouse plague is.
Literally 10s of millions of mice. Cats won’t even make a dent.
Feel like you just need more cat
Dingos and quolls would be a better option.
Unfortunately we don’t have many endemic predators in Australia.
Also domestic and feral Canis Lupus Familaris in urban areas would dilute the gene pool of Canis Lupus Dingo, which isn’t great either.
And Dasyurus Geoffroii are also vulnerable to Canis Lupus Familaris and larger feral Felis Catus.
My cat would have that sorted in a week.
DM: Everything in Australia can kill you, from giant spiders to drop bears etc.,
Mice: Hold on, DM! I choose, “invasive species.”
:|
