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6.1 Exotic and Endangered Species When you hear someone bubbling enthusiastically about an exotic species, you can safely bet the speaker isn抰 an ecologist. This is a name for a resident of an established community that was deliberately or accidentally moved from its home range and became established elsewhere. Unlike most imports, which can抰 take hold outside their home range, an exotic species permanently insinuates itself into a new community. Sometimes the additions are harmless and even have beneficial effects. More often, they make native species endangered species, which by definition are extremely vulnerable to extinction. Of all species on the rare or endangered lists or that recently became extinct, close to 70 percent owe their precarious existence or demise to displacement by exotic species. Two examples are included here to illustrate the problem. During the 1800s, British settlers in Australia just couldn抰 bond with the koalas and kangaroos, so they started to import familiar animals from their homeland. In 1859, in what would be the start of a wholesale disaster, a northern Australian landowner iamported and then released two dozen wild European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus). Good food and good sport hunting梩hat was the idea. An ideal rabbit habitat with no natural predators was the reality. Six years later, the landowner had killed 20,000 rabbits and was besieged by 20,000 more. The rabbits displaced livestock, even kangaroos. Now Australia has 200 to 300 million hippityhopping through the southern half of the country. They overgraze perennial grasses in good times and strip bark from shrubs and trees during droughts. You know where they抳e been; they transform grasslands and shrublands into eroded deserts. They have been shot and poisoned. Their warrens have been plowed under, fumigated, and dynamited. Even when all-out assaults reduced their population size by 70 percent, the rapidly reproducing imports made a comeback in less than a year. Did