Bounties Work! Louisiana Stops Coastline Loss With A $ 5 Bounty On Nutria Tails

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PETA won't like this story. Louisiana has suffered the loss of millions of acres of coastal wetlands. Not due to global warming, hurricanes, oil exploration, or any of the other bogeymen of the environmental left. An invasive and hungry rodent, the nutria, is destroying the root systems of coastal plants. When the plants go, the coastline recedes.

This lede is from a long form story posted on Deutsche Welle. Of course, DW couldn't bring itself to praise the bounty hunters, but they couldn't ignore them either:

https://www.dw.com/en/destruction-of...ine/a-49054631

Destruction of wetlands: swamp rats eating away at Louisiana's fragile coastline
The US state of Louisiana has funded a program to slaughter nutria, or swamp rats, laying waste to the coastline. The animals eat the roots of swamp vegetation to the point they have no chance of growing back.
Mara Lazer - July 17, 2019

With its maze of swamps, bayous and marshes, southern Louisiana is a place where alligators laze with one eye open, egrets and herons fly among Spanish moss and where oak trees sprawl. It's a place of great natural beauty.

But that beauty is being eaten away by climate change, rising sea levels, increasingly dangerous tropical storms, oil and gas industries that dredge and cut into the land. And by the nutria.

About the size of a domestic cat, the animal also known as the swamp rat has brown fur, a beaver-like head and long and destructive orange incisors. It's those teeth and the animals' predilection for swamp vegetation that makes them a pest in the state of Louisiana, where coastal land loss is a real problem.

Liz Lecompte who grew up in the town of Lockport, Louisiana, lives about half an hour away from the current southern edge of the state's land. She worries about the young children in her family.

"When they are going to be in their 70s and 80s, they might not have no more Grand Isle, no more Golden Meadow, Leeville, Fouchon," she says listing towns near the gulf edge of the state.

Nutria eat the roots of vegetation in swamps, to the point that they have no chance of growing back. They can eat large swaths of marshes overnight, leaving open water in their path.

Easy adapters

First brought to the region from South America by fur farmers in the late 19th century, swamp rats took to their new home easily. So easily, that their numbers exploded across southern Louisiana. That led to a booming fur business that thrived until the mid-1980s, when pelts fell out of fashion. As a result, nutria numbers soared, and the state experienced massive land loss.

Because the animals have no natural predators in the area, locals have, over the years, launched several initiatives to curb the population.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has asked chefs around the state to put swamp rats on the menu, local fashion designers have tried to reignite interest in their fur, and SWAT teams have used the animals for shooting practice at night.

Of everything that's been tried, the Coastwide Nutria Control Program, which pays hunters and trappers 4.4€ ($5) for every nutria tail they bring in, has been the most successful. By 2002, the numbers had dropped.,,,,

Lots more at the hyperlink, above.

Florida is also offering bounties to clear invasive snakes out of the Everglades.

[JohnJak]

Should work in California also.