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The Rat that Ate Florida

© Dorothy Hoffman

Rats the size of a dog with an appetite as big as all outdoors are munching their way through the backroads and swamplands of nearly every state in the U.S. Natives of South America, these giant rodents have no natural predators in the Northern hemisphere and have been rapidly proliferating and eating up their environments at an alarming rate.

No, this is not the plot of some lame horror movie about mutant creatures taking their revenge on humanity. It's a real environmental horror story about a pleasant-natured, water-loving rodent called the nutria who was torn from his peaceful life in his natural habitat and brought to the U.S. by misguided entrepreneurs who thought they'd get rich from the exotic fur.

But things didn't go quite according to plan - water rat coats never became the fashion rage the importers had anticipated, and "giant rat meat" was a hard sell in America's finer restaurants. So unwanted nutria were released into the wild to fend for themselves. And they managed to fend very well. Seeking out hospitable swamps, rivers, and lakes, they thrived on the local vegetation.

WHAT'S A NUTRIA?

Resembling beavers but with a scaly rat-like tail, nutria can weight up to 30 pounds, measure about 3 feet long from snout to tail tip, and consume about 3 pounds of vegetation a day. Their typical home is a shallow burrow along a pond or stream where they dine on aquatic plants. But they also enjoy local crops such as rice, carrots and other vegetables. Along coastal areas they even find shellfish a great delicacy. In Oregon they have been accused of causing erosion by digging into stream beds or the levees that protect lowlands from floods.

Nutria, according to some scientists and environmentalists, are literally eating away many of the country's wetlands and agricultural areas in Texas, Louisiana, and Maryland as well as some 19 other states. Since nutria were introduced into the Maryland's Blackwater refuge 50 years ago, more than 7,000 acres of refuge marsh have been destroyed, and the rate of loss has accelerated to about 500 acres of refuge wetlands a year. Much of the remaining marsh is significantly damaged and could soon be lost for good, according to wildlife biologists.

Louisiana, ground zero for the nutria import enterprise some 40 years ago, has the densest nutria population today. Hunters are being paid $3.50 a "head" to track down and eliminate the unpopular rodents. Many of the pelts are exported to Russia while the meat is sold to zoos and alligator farms. Cajun chefs have taken a creative approach to the anti-nutria campaign, cooking up such exotic recipes as nutria fettuccini, but with millions of nutria gobbling up some 80,000 acres of the Louisiana coastal vegetation, even the hungriest restaurant-goers can't possibly keep pace with the voracious rodents.

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