Macquarie Island, a windswept strip of land halfway between Australia and Antarctica, spent nearly two centuries under siege from animals that were never meant to be there. Sealers and whalers introduced cats, rats, rabbits and mice to the island in the nineteenth century, and those species went on to devastate the millions of seabirds that once bred there, wiping out two native bird species entirely along the way. Between 2011 and 2014, teams carried out what became the largest multi-predator eradication ever attempted on an island of its size, clearing Macquarie of its last rabbits, rats and mice after cats had already been removed years earlier. More than a decade later, scientists are now measuring exactly what has come back, tracking seabird populations, vegetation cover and the wider ecosystem to understand how thoroughly the island can recover once its invasive predators are gone.
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