A pest or a prince — is it all down to postcodes?
Introduced to New Zealand by European settlers in the 19th century to remind themselves of home, hedgehogs found themselves in a paradise free of natural predators and bursting with ground-nesting birds, wētā (insects), lizards and invertebrates. They adapted well... too well
If ecology had its own comedy genre, it would surely be irony.
Let’s take the European rabbit. In Australia, they’re the four-legged embodiment of pestilence; they are crop destroyers, soil gougers, and the reason government departments own entire warehouses of poison. They’ve been fenced out, fenced in, virus-bombed, shot and demonised in folklore.
![<p> The International Union for the Conservation of Nature says that “an ecosystem is collapsed when it is virtually certain that its defining biotic [living] or abiotic [non-living] features are lost from all occurrences, and the characteristic native biota are no longer sustained”.</p> <p> The International Union for the Conservation of Nature says that “an ecosystem is collapsed when it is virtually certain that its defining biotic [living] or abiotic [non-living] features are lost from all occurrences, and the characteristic native biota are no longer sustained”.</p>](/cms_media/module_img/9930/4965053_12_augmentedSearch_iStock-1405109268.jpg)