Feds help state battle 3foot ‘ rats’ that have 100 babies a year.
The pesky 3footlong, bucktoothed nutria is getting the better of California.
The large rodent is chewing up rivers and wetlands and threatening to mow down farmland and infrastructure, and the state is struggling to contain it. The animal’s dizzying rate of reproduction doesn’t help: A single female has been known to give rise to 100 offspring in a year.
Relief may be on the way. On Friday, President Trump signed a bipartisan bill that offers a financial boost for California’s fledgling effort to stop the invasion.
And the assistance couldn’t have come soon enough. State wildlife teams are at a critical juncture in their battle to keep the burrowing nutria from undermining roads, canals and water supplies at several spots in the Central Valley, including the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta.
“We have one opportunity to do this,” said Greg Gerstenberg, a senior biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
who is helping lead the program to wipe out nutria. “If we don’t do this and do it successfully now, our chance of eradication starts to go away.”
The new legislation, introduced in the House by Rep. Josh Harder, DTurlock ( Stanislaus County), expands the nation’s Nutria Eradication and Control Act. As written in 2003, the measure made government grant money available only to historical hot spots for the pest — the Louisiana coast and Chesapeake Bay, where hundreds of thousands of the semiaquatic rodents have terrorized landscapes. Now, California and other states are eligible for funding, starting this fiscal year.
“This really shows that despite all the partisan rancor so close to an election, it’s still possible to get people to work together,” Harder said. “It’s a uniting issue. ... Farmers want to get this invasive species out of their land because it destroys almond trees and wetlands. And environmentalists understand that these swamp rats are dangerous.”
The law, which passed the House and Senate with unanimous support, also tripled the amount of money earmarked for nutria eradication. It now stands at $ 12 million a year. States must compete for the funds, but California is expected to get a significant share, owing to what’s at stake and the opportunity to nip the problem early.
The legislation was cosponsored by several California members of Congress and introduced in the Senate by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
The nutria was discovered in California three years ago in Merced County. It now inhabits at least six Central Valley counties, including Fresno, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and
Mariposa. Wildlife officials don’t know where the animal came from, nor do they know how prevalent it is.
California was thought to have rid itself of nutria a half century ago when the state launched an earlier campaign to drive the animal out. Native to South America, the 20pound rodents were brought to the state in the early 1900s to farm their fur — until it became clear that they were more trouble than they’re worth.
Since 2017, the state has been on the defensive. A team of biologists, planners and trappers, which has recently grown to 50 people, has been trudging through rivers and ponds in the San Joaquin Valley to survey the problem.
They’ve trapped and killed nearly 2,000 nutria, though they acknowledge there are a lot more out there. One pond in Stanislaus County had 220 of the critters.
“We’re still optimistic that the population hasn’t spread too extensively, but we won’t know the answer to that question for some time,” Gerstenberg said.
The rodent is believed to have migrated north to the southern part of the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta. This is seen as the doordie point in the nutria fight, and it’s where the state is bolstering its defenses. The delta is the hub of California’s water supply, and state officials worry that large numbers of nutria will destroy levees and riverbanks that hold invaluable freshwater.
“We think we’ll be OK as long as we can maintain the effort we have right now,” Gerstenberg said.
But maintaining the program has been a big if because of shaky financing. The eradication effort has hobbled along on limited state funds — about $ 1.9 million the first year — and a handful of shortterm grants, which make up about twothirds of the program’s budget.
“We have to find a subsequent funding source somewhere,” said Valerie Cook, California’s nutria eradication program manager. “This ( new legislation) has the potential for filling that gap.”
Assuming the money arrives, Cook said she hopes to expand the eradication program and improve what’s been done. The team is employing strategies used on the East Coast to fight the pest and developing new technologydriven tactics of their own.
A plan to use dogs to sniff out the rodents was put on hold earlier this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. The canines were coming from the Chesapeake Bay, where they had helped track nutria, but the travel was canceled. The dogs are being rescheduled for next year.
State officials are also embarking upon a Judas nutria project in which one animal is caught, sterilized and collared, then put back in the wild to lead biologists to the colony. The collars, however, haven’t been transmitting reliable data and several of the rodents equipped with them have died. One nutria was eaten by a coyote.
The eradication team is also looking at genetic testing. By analyzing their variation, state biologists will get a better idea of where the rodents are coming from and how far they’ve spread.
Cook is optimistic that these enhanced efforts will eventually help contain the nutria, though she said it’s difficult to know exactly when.
“I look at 10 to 15 years as a ballpark,” she said. “But the reality is that we’re still learning.”