please think about it Worst invasive species you know. Kudzu: Smothers trees and houses and grows 1 foot per day. Burmese python: stripping small animals from the Everglades. Asian Carp: Cleaning up plankton and swimming towards the Great Lakes.
They all came from different places, arrived without natural predators, outwitted local flora and fauna, and took over entire ecosystems. Kudzu dies when it freezes, carp does not tolerate salt water, and pythons cannot travel long distances very quickly. (Thankfully.)
Now imagine a species with all these benefits. That is, it is an alien species, has no enemies, and has no obstacles to domination. A species that is indifferent to temperature, comfortable in many landscapes, can run much faster than you, and is muscular enough to leave a big dent. in your car. This is one of his six million wild hogs inhabiting the United States, the most intractable aggressor most people have never heard of.
“If you want to create the perfect invasive species that can live anywhere, eat anything, have a very high reproductive rate, is very destructive, and is very difficult to control, look no further. South Carolina John “Jack” Meyer, technical program manager at the state’s federal Savannah River National Laboratory and a prominent authority on wild pigs, says, “In the hot and humid deserts of the American Southwest and everything in between.” They are the ultimate survivors.
Wild pigs, or wild pigs, wild boars, wild pigs, or razorbacks, are nothing new to the United States. By some accounts, they arrived in the 1500s and were brought by Spanish settlers as a portable meat source. Over the centuries, they settled the forests of the southeastern United States, mixing with genes from escaped domestic pigs and imported Eurasian wild boar for hunting. Its ad-hoc mating produced a package of razor fangs and bristles that were 3 feet tall and 5 feet long. It retains the aggression of its wild ancestors, yet features the large piglets and rapid breeding cycle of domestic pigs.
It might have been better if the pigs stayed in the forest. But in the last few decades they have been on the move, moving from suburbs to cities, and at one point he reached 48 states. To feral pigs, the modern human landscape – farms, flower gardens, golf courses, landfills – is a buffet of all-you-can-eat. “They will eat anything that has calories,” says James Lacourt, a wildlife veterinarian with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “They are mammalian cockroaches.”
The damage they cause isn’t the only challenge unique to wild boars, which is estimated to be $2.5 billion annually. And while it’s not a disease that can be transmitted to domesticated pigs or humans, its terrifying potential keeps biologists up at night. There is no way to control them. Fences cannot hold them. Capturing and shooting can only keep populations low if they are low to begin with. And despite a wealth of research, the control of pharmaceuticals, either contraceptives or poisons, which biologists call toxins, is still years away.
