“The nutria control plan is something that people are doing that’s actually having an impact on the culture. “There’s a lot of controversy about what should be done to rejuvenate the land,” Quinn Costello, one of the film’s directors, told The Daily Beast. In 2002, Louisiana began a bounty campaign–$5 per scalped tail– that a new documentary, Rodents of Unusual Size, presents as a model program.
In warm winters, when the weather only browns foliage but does not kill it, nutrias hide easily among the mud and leaves.įaced with a plague of rodents, Louisiana has asked humans to join the hunt.
Female nutrias can have three litters a year, usually with five to a dozen young each time. Like rats, nutrias seem to thrive in the record temperatures of each passing year, suggesting that hardy rodents may flourish in the conditions of climate change, if only temporarily. Weighing up to 20 pounds, they are too large for coyotes and foxes to prey on alligators cannot eat enough of them. Like pythons in Florida or black rats around the Pacific, nutrias have voracious appetites and few predators. “Trying to eradicate nutria in Louisiana would not be a feasible goal,” she said. They bite, claw, and carry at least one parasite that can infect humans, called “nutria itch” or “ creeping eruption.”Ĭatherine Normand, a biologist with Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said the creatures are intractable. Like their smaller rodent cousins residing in New York City, they do not fear people. Tens of millions of nutrias have carved tunnels from Washington state through Texas and Florida and back north into Maryland and New Jersey. And they’re making their presence known far beyond their native Louisiana.
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