FEATURED ARTICLE

Animals can solve environmental problems

Using animals to solve environmental problems is not a new idea. It was vigorously put into practice when a new faith in science swept 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. And sometimes it worked. Thus the Australian ladybird brought to California a century ago was successful in controlling cottony cushion scale, a common citrus pest, and in 1931 stoats and weasels did a nifty job with a plague of water voles on the North Sea island of Terschelling. But these success stories were unusual. Much more common was the destruction or transformation of the environment, sometimes leading to the mass extinction of indigenous species.

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