Pest animals
Aquatic ecosystems also have introduced pests. Pest animals like rabbits and possums can destroy riparian plants. Aquatic animals such as koi carp and catfish foul the water and compete with native species for food and habitat.
Dr Eloise Ryan talks about pest animals in the Waikato River system. Select here to view the video transcript.
The following resources explore the impacts of pest animals on terrestrial and aquatic habitats.
Articles
Interactives
Activities
PLD webinar
Transcript
DR ELOISE RYAN
Lake Waikare is just teeming with carp, and carp are all over our Waikato lakes. They’re eating all our native aquatic macrophytes and plants and having huge water quality impacts.
Another species that causes a lot of issues is called catfish. And catfish have little barbels off their chin, and the problem is that they are bottom feeders. That is, they swim along the bottom and their barbels stir up the sediment – so increase the turbidity of the water – and also they rip up our native aquatic plants, so that leads to a lot of destruction that way.
Acknowledgements
Dr Eloise Ryan
Waikato Regional Council
Catfish stills, epitree. Sourced from iNaturalist NZ and released under CC-BY-NC 4.0
Acknowledgement
This video has been developed in partnership with the Waikato Regional Council as part of the Rivers and Us resource.
