Australia has long suffered from plagues and plagues. Rodents, insects, diseases, poisonous toads, self-replicating poisonous starfish, flesh-eating bacteria – we Australians have all of this and more.
You would think there would be some progress in the 2020s. But you are wrong. I haven’t slept well lately. For months, my REM sleep was interrupted by the sounds of rats moving along the walls of my room.
These rodents took up residence in my Melbourne bedroom in early summer, but countless attempts to plug outside holes, store food in containers, and douse surfaces with ammonia failed to silence the constant banging, hissing, and crying (even with a handful of poisonous ones seeds). My landlord lovingly left it in an old margarine tin.
But dozens of professionally placed baits and $300 later, the noise finally subsided.
“There was a significant amount of feces up there,” the pest controller told me as he climbed down from the attic. It seems to be mostly rats. “The same probably applies to mice.”
The rodent plague was the first of many to hit Australia. European rats and mice were introduced by the First Fleet in 1788 and spread British diseases to our native fauna, destroying crops and destroying buildings for centuries.
To date, much to the confusion of scientists, rat epidemics have only occurred in two countries: China and Australia. The first rat invasions occurred in the late 19th century in South Australia and New South Wales, where farmers used tractors to destroy the nests of thousands of escaped young. Since then, the incidence, frequency and severity have increased.
2021 more heat, more rain, more problems for Australia
The worst results on record came in 2021, when heavy rains helped trees and crops thrive after years of drought.
Millions of insects attacked and bit the entire population inside and outside the houses, invaded the hospitals, bit the patients, flooded their “carpets” and devastated the fields in just a few days. As a result, the economy suffered a loss of around a billion dollars. And that was just an epidemic.
The reality is that Australia, despite being an island full of mostly cute herbivores, has a long history of invasion by alien creatures, bacteria and viruses at the behest of the colonists.
In 1860, Victoria was so plagued by disease that the government had to build an infectious disease hospital to combat the epidemic and treat patients with diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox and scarlet fever.
But after much renovation, it was finally converted into a mental institution in 1996, two decades before the Covid-19 pandemic rocked our health system and killed 20,000 Australians.
Australia has a fragile ecosystem with no shortage of space, incredible vegetation and a stupid imperial government that constantly imports animals for sport, agriculture and even policing and other pests.
When the First Fleet brought sugar cane to our warm lands for cultivation, the local beetles happily ate the sweet tubers. So in 1932, Arthur Bell, an entomologist working for the Bureau of Sugar Experiments, came up with a solution: Puerto Rican amphibians! Eureka.
Cane toads, a poisonous, fast-reproducing and hungry species, have been released into the wild – 2,400 of them at a time – without any research or reporting on the potential impact they could have on the Australian environment.
100 years later, these virtually indestructible invaders have spread across the country, and some communities celebrate “Toad Days” every year, when families can collect and sacrifice cane toads.
However, in 2010, the Australian government stated: “It is unlikely that widespread control of cane toads will be achieved across Australia.”
The only species that poses a threat to the cane toad is the white stork, native to Australia, which has learned to shake the toad’s neck to get rid of its excrement, leaving any toxins on the skin, and then dissipate into the river to rinse off whatever makes them It’s a safe snack.
2024 new year, new pests (in addition to the old ones)
In 2024, our ecosystem will be strangled by countless diseases, largely due to climate change and the search for ways to survive and overcome them.
And top politicians have created the conditions for it: mining, logging, fracking, drilling, spraying and expanding emissions cuts and taxes on fossil fuels, while at the same time continuing to commit genocide against those who truly know what this earth needs: to heal and to survive.
According to the Department of Agriculture, in January fire ants, “one of the worst invasive species to strike Australia”, were discovered in large numbers wriggling and floating in Queensland’s flood waters while drowning our native species. .
During the school holidays, the Victorian coast is littered with the corpses of cabbage moths washed up by the waves. In the caterpillar stage, this is a common pest for gardeners and farmers, destroying the tender leaves of many vegetables. But warmer weather has fueled a wave of summer hatches, tinting the windshields of luxury cars traveling the Great Ocean Road white.
In February, a new global study found that rising temperatures and cycles of drought and heavy rain could cause locusts to multiply at biblical rates.
A swarm of locusts can eat more than 1,000kg of green vegetation per day, and many species have eaten crops worth millions of dollars in the eight largest locust plagues in Australia since records began in 1930.
Meanwhile, our koalas are infected with scabies, a skin disease caused by imported ticks, our koala population is threatened by chlamydia, around 300 million of our native birds are mauled by wild cats every year, and our marsupials are affected. They eat the bacteria that cause Buruli ulcer, which came to Australia via mosquitoes from West Africa.
It seems now more than ever that the day is approaching when Australia will be completely immersed in a pest vortex and we will have to pay to drive rats from our homes, shoot flies from helicopters and go toad hunting as a family.
Next time you hear a rat in your ceiling, I want you to think carefully.