Invasive Species Initiative Essay Example

foxes are golden, reddish-brown, silver, or even black. Both parents care for their young through the summer before they are able to strike out on their own in the fall.” Sadly though, red foxes are hunted down for sport but other times they are killed for being disruptive and/or carrying rabies. The red fox was originally from Europe and then was intentionally introduced to Australia. Eventually, the species spread over to eastern America.

You can say it was intentional because it would be pretty obvious for a species to spread. So the people that introduced the red fox to Australia most likely knew that it would spread to other places in the world. According to the website Invasive Species Initiative, “Known for their luscious red coats, European red foxes were intentionally introduced in Australia in the 1850s for recreational hunting and have since spread across most of the continent. They were also introduced in the eastern United States and can be found throughout the country.” Their food web goes something like this: The red fox is the consumer in its food web. Its life span is normally 2-5 years. The main effect of the red fox is that they kill off most species until it is a threatened or endangered species.

According to the website Invasive Species Initiative, “ In North America red foxes pose a great threat to ground-nesting birds such as duck and grouse. This is all in addition to being a threat to poultry, small farm animals, and children.” The native species like the rodent and marsupial species have been affected by the red fox. For example, in the website Invasive Species Initiative, “In

Australia, red foxes have decimated populations of native rodent and marsupial species. One study showed that the removal of red foxes greatly increased numbers of the near-threatened black-footed rock-wallaby, indicating foxes had a negative impact on their populations.” There are ways to control the red fox species but they are considerably pricey. According to the website Invasive Species Initiative, “The most commonly used method is fox baiting, which involves setting baits with 1080 poison.” Even though these methods do seem to work, they can be very expensive and difficult to do.

For example, “ This has relatively successful results, but it costs $1.3 million to bait an area of 35,000 sq km in size for a year. Exclusionary fencing helps keep foxes out of unwanted areas, but that is pricy too — about $10,000 per km.” It isn’t easy to remove a species from an area once they have multiplied and keep multiplying. Sadly, you can’t just tell a species to leave and area because of it’s bad effects because it simply won’t care at all. There are many methods to try to control the red fox species. For example, baiting, Canid Pest Ejectors, fencing, shooting, trapping, guard animals, and lastly habitat manipulation.

Adding on to this, according to the website, Department Of Primary Industries, it states, “Reducing the impact of the red fox relies on a mixture of control techniques comprising poison baiting, shooting, trapping, fencing, and guard animals.” But, no matter how many methods there are, they still don’t work. For example, from the same website above, “All these techniques have a short term effect on local fox numbers. No single control method will be

successful on its own and when foxes are removed from an area, reinvasion or immigration from existing untreated areas generally occurs within 2 to 6 weeks.” This all means that even though they have different techniques to try to get rid of foxes, they don’t always work, and when they do, the foxes simply reappear again.