On Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia, the devastating bushfire season of 2019-20 left behind an unlikely biosecurity opportunity. The fires wiped out an estimated 90% of the island’s feral pig population, which had been preying on newborn lambs, destroying grain and potato crops, muddying watercourses and severely disrupting the island’s unique native biodiversity.
After the fires, landholders and researchers moved quickly, using modelling to work out what it would take to remove the survivors before they could rebound. Three years later, Corey Bradshaw, the Matthew Flinders professor of global ecology at Flinders University, says: “We don’t have pigs any more, which is a world first in an area this large.”
