![]() ![]() In Tasmania and New Zealand, rabbits also became a pest decades after their introduction. “It highlights that whatever we do, we need to avoid … bringing into this country and having them escape.” “The numbers of foxes and cats and dingoes tend to be much higher in areas where there’s lots of rabbits, and that means that it makes it harder for other animals to live because there’s more predators.” The damage wreaked by rabbits to agricultural crops is an estimated $200m yearly.Īn unappreciated impact of the pests is that they have amplified predation pressures across the continent, Letnic said. “There’s rabbits that live in relatively cool and comparatively moist areas of Australia, and then there’s rabbits that live in the middle of the desert.” The Barwon Park rabbits had “invaded many different environments across the country”, Letnic said. Study co-author Prof Mike Letnic, of the University of New South Wales, said the wild rabbits introduced to Barwon Park may have had genetic traits that made them more likely to survive in the Australian wilderness. Many previous introductions had involved rabbits with domestic origins, with reports of “tameness, fancy coat colours and floppy ears” as traits. ![]() The researchers hypothesise the Barwon Park rabbits were likely more successful in spreading because of their wild ancestry. Two groups of rabbits – one in Sydney, and one in Cattai national park, to the city’s north-west – had distinct ancestry, the study showed. The analysis also found evidence of other rabbit introductions that led to surviving populations, but without wide geographical spread. The researchers traced DNA found in the mitochondria of cells – which is inherited from the mother – and estimated that “the mainland Australian rabbits in our dataset trace their maternal ancestry back to five females that were introduced from Europe”. The prevalence of rare gene variants in Australian rabbits also increased with distance from Barwon Park, a process known to occur in geographically expanding populations. The research team, led by the University of Cambridge and the CIBIO Institute in Portugal, found that mainland Australian rabbits were most genetically similar to populations found in the south-west of England, near Baltonsborough. In addition to historical records, they analysed genetic material from 187 European rabbits caught across mainland Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Great Britain and France between 18. Scientists now say the continent-wide rabbit invasion resulted from this single importation, rather than previous multiple introductions. ![]() Within three years, the animals had multiplied into the thousands. In 1859, Austin received a consignment of 24 wild and domestic rabbits from his brother in Baltonsborough, in south-west England. But despite at least 90 subsequent importations, populations only exploded in the latter half of the 19th century – rabbits then spread across the entire Australian continent within 50 years, at a rate of 100km a year. ![]()
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