In 1950, Australia turned a virus into a weapon. The myxoma virus was deliberately introduced to control the out-of-control rabbit population in the country, and it worked right away. According to Alves et al. in the Science study ‘Parallel Adaptation of Rabbit Populations to Myxoma Virus,’ the disease spread over 2,000 kilometers in less than three months, killing 99% of infected animals. Then Alves et al. note that the virus was illegally introduced in France in 1952 and reached the UK by 1953, again with devastating results in both countries. Then, quietly, evolution started pushing back.
The backstory: a pest of biblical proportions
European rabbits were thought to have been introduced to Australia by an English settler, Thomas Austin, in the 1850s, according to Alves and colleagues. Within a century, there were hundreds of millions of them, wreaking havoc on native plants and animals in Australia. Myxomatosis seemed like the answer. But nature had other ideas.
Scientists read a rabbit's DNA across 150 years
Now, the landmark study in Science by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the CIBIO Institute in Porto has revealed, in fine genetic detail, how the rabbits rewired themselves to survive. An international team extracted DNA from nearly 200 rabbits dating from 1865 to 2013, including one that once belonged to Charles Darwin and is now in London’s Natural History Museum, said Alves et al. The samples were taken from 11 natural history museums in the UK, France, Australia, and the US. The team sequenced almost 20,000 genes to identify mutations that occurred after the pandemics of the 1950s.
