Mice Plague in Australia Continues to Wreak Havoc Due to Exploding Population of Rodents

Julie Leven and her husband Des brought their camper up to visit their son in northern New South Wales, Australia, just before Christmas last year. They noticed masses of white dots moving over the black road surface as they drove back to their house in Gilgandra, some 430 kilometers northwest of Sydney, at night. They immediately discovered the dots were mice.

The house mouse (Mus musculus) has arrived in Australia with British colonists in the late 1700s, swiftly establishing itself in local ecosystems and posing a threat to native species. "In Australia, competition with introduced rodents is one of the risks to native rodents," says Emily Roycroft, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "It's generally pretty difficult for the ecosystem to maintain more than one species that are comparable in that manner when creatures consume similar foods and have similar body sizes," Roycroft adds.

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