Are Chinese gerbils taking the rap for climate change?
Debate rages about the declining state of , which are known to . Research suggests that other factors, like climate change, are turning prairies into desert, but Chinese officials are nonetheless planning to exterminate the humble gerbil.
This not-so-little mouse on the prairie , contributing to the decline of grasslands. With populations of the critter spiralling out of control, Chinese officials are apparently .
Will exterminating wild gerbils save China's praires? Not according to research published in the science journal PNAS in 2007. According to this, the real culprits are overgrazing by livestock and climate change, both of which damage grasslands by encouraging woody shrubs like Artemesia frigida to invade:
'A. frigida tends to increase under heavy grazing and other disturbances, is unpalatable to livestock, invades deteriorated grasslands, and is considered a weed ... Our results, which indicate that growth of A. frigida can be enhanced dramatically simply by increasing ... CO2, suggest that rising atmospheric CO2 already may be causing important changes in the ecology of the semi-arid grasslands.'
Exterminating the gerbil could even make matters far worse. generally creating far more problems than it solves. Take . What Mao hadn't anticipated was that sparrows prevent plagues of the biblical crop pest, the locust. When he wiped them out, locusts ate all of the crops, contributing to a famine that killed 38 million people. The message is fairly clear: mess with nature at your peril.
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