Oil Spill's Latest Villain Has Four Legs, Sharp Teeth

(May 22) -- Amid the animal and marine life living in Louisiana's coastal swamps is one critter few would mourn if the gulf oil spill wiped it out.

But in a bitter twist, those nutria haters are not likely to get their wish.

Weighing in at about 20 pounds and built like a small beaver, the semiaquatic rodent may be physically unimposing, but in terms of the destruction it's wreaked on Louisiana's coastal wetlands, it's any bulldozer's equal. Indeed, one of the reasons the wetlands are so vulnerable to the crude gushing from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is thanks to the nutria's handiwork.

The South American import -- which has webbed feet and is at home both in water and on land -- feeds on marsh grass, considers roots a delicacy and is blamed for ravaging almost 100,000 acres of wetlands along the coast. Nutria have been chewing their way through the marshes with such gusto over the past six decades that they've secured a place on the top 100 list of the The National Invasive Species Council.

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Nutrias, which were brought to the United States for their fur in the late 19th century, have become pests in Louisiana, burrowing into levees along drainage canals.

"They dig down into the marsh and basically destroy the root system that holds the marsh together," said Edmond Mouton, a biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and head of the state's nutria control program. "The area can be scoured out and those wetlands can turn into open water."

Nutria also burrow into levees along the drainage canals, weakening them. Adding insult to injury: "For people who live along canals or a bayou, the nutria will come up into the yard and chew on their lawn or eat their tulips or eat their lawn furniture and chew on their boat docks," Mouton said.

Hard to believe, but Louisiana once welcomed nutria, which were brought to the United States for their fur in the late 19th century. Before the fur market collapsed in the 1980s, their pelts at one point commanded a higher price here than those of the long-popular muskrat.

Stories abound about the nutria's introduction to Louisiana. One oft-told version has it that E.A. McIlhenny, creator of Tabasco sauce, brought them to the family pepper farm on Avery Island, 140 miles west of New Orleans, to raise them for their fur. The nutria subsequently escaped during a hurricane, moved into the marsh and did what nutria did best: eat and propagate.

That story is only half-right, but it is so widely believed that the folks at Avery Island felt compelled to clarify the facts on the Tabasco website. McIlhenny was not the first, but rather the third nutria farmer to set up in Louisiana, and he picked up his nutria from a fur farmer downriver from New Orleans. The hurricane escape is dismissed as Louisiana hyperbole. Still, McIlhenny did play a role in the nutria's proliferation by turning loose what is vaguely described as "a large number" of the rodents along the south Louisiana coast.

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In the 1940s, nutria briefly were considered heroic protectors of the wetlands for their ability to control aquatic weeds, mainly the non-native water hyacinth. But as their numbers multiplied -- a female can birth 15 to 18 young in 18 months -- they quickly became known as pests. The population reached 20 million in the 1970s, Mouton said.

In the years since, there has been an assortment of efforts to eradicate the little beasts, including trapping, gassing and poisoning. In the 1990s, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department SWAT team even hunted nutrias in the canals for target practice. Last month, parish officials announced a plan to hire a full-time trapper to remove them from canals.

For the past eight years, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has also been paying trappers $4 a tail, a bounty that recently raised to $5. "We like to call them incentive payments," Mouton said. The program brings in about 300,000 tails a year.

Mouton has no illusions that his department can eradicate the nutria from Louisiana. But "if we can control them down to the numbers that the landscape can tolerate," he said, "we could keep them at bay and greatly reduce the number of acres they impact."

The oil spill may yet have a role to play in all this. Despite the dire predictions that it could destroy Louisiana's culture and way of life, though, locals think nutria will survive. They survived Katrina, and they'll survive the oil.

"They are very resilient. Very adaptive," Mouton said.

"Trapper John," a professional swamp pest exterminator who bid on the Jefferson Parish job, echoed that sentiment. He's been hunting nutria for years and knows they're tough.

"I don't think the oil will bother them," he said. "They'll just move to the river, which won't have any oil in it. They're going to get away."

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