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333H_E t1_iwiixx4 wrote

Bad for birds hell on the rodent population. But the farmers may see increased yield from crops with the removal of other species which feed on/destroy said crops. Lose the chicken but get more corn. I'm interested to see how it plays out in years to come.

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ash_274 t1_iwizvam wrote

Kill off the birds and rodents and then expect the insect population to explode. Get enough of a grasshopper population boom and they could go full locust and your problem turns biblical. This generally is going to be fucked in various ways over the next 5-15 years because of one "save the poor minks" guy that didn't think beyond the "???" step.

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333H_E t1_iwj1utm wrote

Being the omnivorous creatures that minks are those locusts will get it too. It was by all means a terrible idea to let them loose. It's about managing the best of a bad situation at this point.

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RawrIhavePi t1_iwlioc8 wrote

I mean, technically locusts and grasshoppers aren't the same thing and grasshoppers don't swarm like locusts do in the right (wrong) conditions.

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hesh582 t1_iwmnwiu wrote

I think it's going to be a lot less interesting than people think.

They're domesticated animals, bred for docility for a couple centuries. They never learned to hunt as pups. They've never seen anything but a cage. They've never eaten live prey. They're small animals with no experience dealing with predators. They're all starting in a small area that can't support even a fraction of them. It's almost winter. They're incredibly high metabolism animals that must eat constantly to survive.

Also... one thing to note. Mink farms are continually leaking mink into the surrounding ecosystem. Always and forever. It probably actually hurts the local mink population (these are native to the area) in the long run by introducing subpar domesticate traits into the wild population.

There will be a brief and localized surge in predation, then the overwhelming majority will starve to death and the mink population will rapidly return to where it was before, with worse genetics. In a couple years there may actually be fewer mink than there were before.

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333H_E t1_iwn6aex wrote

I'd argue the docility part. They're hardwired little killing machines, unlike ferrets for example. I do enjoy multiple perspectives on the outcome though. It's all guesswork at this point so it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out. Of course whatever the humans do will be a variable in the equation too.

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