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

• An introduced species – koi carp

• Trapping koi carp

• Human impacts on the Waikato River

Interactives

• Urban stream restoration for native fish

• Te whakaora o ngā kōawa kei ngā tāone mō ngā ika taketake

• 1080 and pest control – a timeline

Activities

• What is present?

PLD webinar

• Pest detectives

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.