Today, as you probably heard because this topic gets covered everywhere, scientists announced that sex – copulation, actually — started here in Australia.
Three hundred and sixty five years ago. In fish.
Until the discovery of embryonic fish fetuses in the fossilized remains of a “placoderm,” nobody thought the process of sperm combining with eggs inside a female body of any kind had begun so early in our evolutionary past.
So I expect to see, on Brisbane cars very soon, “We did it first!” bumper stickers.
Rampant sexual reproduction was a key element of an already well-know Aussie story, of course, the rabbit plague.
Radio programs are reminding us that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the introduction of rabbits to Australia. No hip hip, and no hooray for that, of course.
A wealthy landowner, who wanted to be reminded of England and to have something to hunt, freed 25 on his property in the state of Victoria in 1859. The eventual result: 600 million rabbits.
The story is actually interesting and involves some famous names.
Within a couple of decades of the landowner’s world-class mistake, the rabbit problem had become so bad that a prize of one million dollars was offered for a biological solution. How much would that be in 2009 dollars?
I don’t know, but it was enough to get Louis Pasteur interested after his wife read about the contest in a French newspaper. Having stumbled onto the fact that a chicken cholera he’d been studying also killed rabbits, he decided that his persistent problems with funding his research were over. He sent a team led by a handsome young nephew to Australia with some vials of chicken cholera and instructions to stay until the prize was handed over.
Pasteur’s solution might have worked except for three problems.
1. Chickens, which people wanted to keep alive.
2. The cholera worked too fast on rabbits and would probably have killed out colonies before the disease could spread to other colonies of bunnies.
3. The Rabbit Commission, made up of contest judges from all the Australian states, included at least a couple of people with interests in barbed-wire companies. That commission rejected, in 1889, all contest entries and recommended a law requiring barbed-wire fences for all rural properties.
Their decision eventually led to the ineffective rabbit-proof fence that we’ve all heard about, but the Rabbit Commission was the first official act of inter-state cooperation, so its creation may have furthered federation.
Pasteur’s nephew wasn’t a total waste, either. He applied one of his uncle’s inventions to a problem the Victoria Bitters company was having, thereby making a success of VB beer. And he had what was an evidently a torrid affair with a famous entertainer who happened to be touring Australia, Sarah Barnhart.
Meanwhile, the rabbits were also busy doing what comes naturally. The amount of damage done to the plants and animals of the country, both in the wild and on grazing land, is conceded to be beyond estimate, but a recent official guess put annual damage from rabbits at $600 million to farmland and $200-300 million to the rest of the Australian environment.
TOMORROW: A second shot at the rabbits
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