In October 1865, rabbits were deliberately released on Enderby Island, a remote island in New Zealand’s subantarctic Auckland Islands, with a practical purpose: to provide a potential source of food for people who might become stranded there after a shipwreck. The rabbits, brought from Australia, established a breeding population and survived for the next 127 years in an environment very different from the conditions in which domestic rabbits were normally kept.
Enderby Island is the northernmost island of the Auckland Islands group, where cold, wet and windy conditions made survival difficult for introduced animals. With no regular human management, the rabbits adapted to the island and, over generations of isolation, developed characteristics that distinguished them from mainland wild rabbits.
