Australia's rabbit invasion began with just 24 animals brought from England in 1869, a new study has confirmed.
Key points:
- Genetic data has been used to trace Australia's rabbit plague to its origin
- It began with 24 wild rabbits from England, researchers confirmed
- Those rabbits were better able to adapt than the domestic animals which came before them, according to the study
Researchers used historical and genetic data to track the animals back to their importer, Thomas Austin, who had shipped the wild rabbits to hunt.
The arrival of these two dozen animals triggered a biological invasion of the entire country, according to the study which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors refer to the species' introduction as "one of the most iconic and devastating biological invasions in recorded history".
They traced the rabbits' genetics to their wild forebears, and argue this ancestry made them better able to adapt to – and invade – Australia.
One of the study's co-authors, Mike Letnic of the University of New South Wales, said earlier domestic populations brought over for their meat and fur had not got the same foothold.
"It was the wild animals that had the right stuff that took over Australia," Professor Letnic said.
"When those wild rabbits arrived in Australia, they're the rabbits that survived the long voyage from England.
"The ones that got here came without diseases. There were relatively few predators and so those animals thrived and to such an extent that Australia was described as having a grey blanket, the blanket being the rabbits, and they degraded a huge amount of the country."
Rabbit numbers nosedived after biological controls were brought in in the 1950s and 1990s.
Before World War II, rabbits sustained multiple industries, and rabbit meat was one of the most widely eaten in Australia, Professor Letnic said.
"If you read old accounts, it was an incredible number of rabbits. The biological control was so effective that it was no longer economical for people to catch wild rabbits for the market."
The study's findings showed how important it is for Australia to keep up strict biosecurity, he said.
"It doesn’t really help us a lot in how we deal with the problem when the horse has bolted or the rabbit has bred – but what it does tell us is how really careful we have to be when we bring an animal in in the first place."