Fascinating:

But as a terrible consequence of the first whalers making landfall there 150 years ago, Gough has become the stage for one of nature’s great horror shows. Mice stowed away on the whaling boats jumped ship and have since multiplied to 700,000 or more on an island of about 25 square miles.

What is horrifying ornithologists is that the British house mouse has somehow evolved, growing to up to three times the size of ordinary domestic house mice, and instead of surviving on a diet of insects and seeds, has adapted itself to become a carnivore, eating albatross, petrel and shearwater chicks alive in their nests. They are now believed to be the largest mice in the world. Yesterday Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation groups, recognised that the mice, who are without predators themselves, are out of control and threatening to make extinct several of the world’s rarest bird species.

Here’s the deal: Mo Nature kills, frequently and without mercy. 99.9999999999% of species that have ever lived are extinct, the great majority of them acheived that without our help. Yes, it’s a “horrorshow” to know that species are being snuffed out left and right because humans are too stupid and lazy to properly preserve delicate environments. That sucks, for a lot of reasons. The two biggest in my mind are 1) All the scientific benefit that is lost when a unique species is lost. Who knows what miracle drugs or energy solutions could’ve been found in them? We fuck ourselves and our future when we recklessly destroy or let a species go extinct, of any kind, great or small, flora or fauna. 2) We barely understand how ecosystems really work. Killing a single species can upset the delicate balance for all the rest of them in any given ecosystem, small scale and large. In the spirit of “the butterfly wing flap that caused a hurricane/Chaos Theory,” similarly, we really shouldn’t think ourselves so knowledgable such that we can choose which species “aren’t important.” We’re just learning the truth of this now, as we attempt serious efforts of repopulation and re-naturalization of ecosystems. It’s way harder than first thought.

Having said all that: do the Killer Mice have the right to live, and thrive? Why are the birds “more important” than this new breed of mouse?  Read more