![]() ![]() “The optimistic view was that this was a very isolated population,” Volkoff recalls. | Christoph Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images Had they been hiding out in the tules, unrecognized or mistaken for muskrats or beavers, or did someone illegally import them from out of state and release them in the San Joaquin Valley? “It’s hard to conceive nutria persisted in the state at low numbers and have gone undetected for almost 50 years, so we believe it was an introduction,” says Martha Volkoff of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Invasive Species Program.Ī woman feeds a piece of dry bread to a coypu, also known as a nutria. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, whose mission is removing unwanted wildlife, found an unfamiliar creature in a beaver trap at a private duck-hunting club in Merced County: a pregnant nutria. Last year, though, a trapper with the U.S. Nutria-borne pathogens include tapeworms, liver flukes, and a nematode worm that causes “swimmer’s itch.” Unsurprisingly, they were targeted by wildlife agencies and believed eradicated by the 1970s. Their burrows, up to 20 feet deep and 164 long, turn levees and roadbeds into Swiss cheese. ![]() Sloppy eaters, they trash 10 times more plant material than they consume, defoliating acres of marsh and exacerbating erosion. They eat any kind of plant that grows in or near water, such as rice and sugar cane, and wild plants - tules, cattails, etc. - which are important to marsh ecosystems. Nutria can put away a quarter of their weight in vegetation - leaves, roots, and all - in a day. As with other exotics like bullfrogs and red foxes, enough nutria escaped from captivity or were liberated when the market went bust to establish a foothold in California’s wilds. ![]()
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