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Nature is a complex vane that human race have barely set out to unpick . And sometimes , when we try , we just wind up make water an even bigger maze .
From causing roof to give way to instigating emu warfare , here are 10 times humans messed with nature and it backfire .
Humans have managed to make some huge errors when it comes to controlling nature.
1. Operation Cat Drop
In response to a malaria irruption in Borneo in the early 1950s , the World Health Organization ( WHO ) spray the island with a herculean insecticide called DDT . This successfully stamp out off the mosquito that carry the disease , but it also triggered a shower of ruinous , unforeseen events .
DDT is an indiscriminate poison that , it turned out , also exterminated parasitic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant that prey on Blackbeard - deplete Caterpillar . Without the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to keep them at bay , the caterpillars multiplied and gnawed at people ’s roof , finally causing the structures to of a sudden collapse .
Then , the island-dweller ' cats set out dying . The insect powder had moved up the food chain , with geckoes wipe out the poisoned insects and cats feasting on the gecko . As the cat died out , the number of rats skyrocketed . The rodents spread disease across the island , sparking irruption of typhus fever and infestation .
Airplanes sprayed powerful pesticides over Borneo amid a malaria outbreak, triggering a cascade of unforeseen events.
In 1960 , the WHO finally launched Operation Cat Drop to staunch the wave of problems it had make , which involve parachuting cats into Borneo . Whilesome reportssay 14,000 cats were airdropped in the successful operation , othersput this number at 23 .
2. The Emu War
When Australian veterans return from scrap in World War I , the government gifted them estate in Western Australia for farming . These holding started out small , but as the Great Depression gripped the country in 1929 , the Modern owners were encouraged to inflate straw product .
In October 1932 , Fannie Farmer who were already in difficulty due to falling wheat cost encounter another threat to their livelihoods . Mobs of emus ( Dromaius novaehollandiae ) — large flightless birds that face like to ostrich and are autochthonal to the outback — suddenly appear , trampling and chowing down on their crops . Emus migrate southwestward after their breeding season in May and June , and the wheat landing field likely provided safe habitat , copious solid food and a dependable source of water .
By November , the damage was so wicked the rector of defense sent soldiers to wage state of war against the emus . On the first day of the Emu War , as it became officially known , the army faced a 50 - strong flock with a battery of machine - shooter ardor that ferment out to be for the most part ineffective . The boo scattered and ran , dodging the bullets . Six days subsequently , with just a dozen fledge casualties , the war was deemed a lost cause , and the soldiers traipsed home . Major Meredith , who led the troops , was quoted in a1953 newsprint clause , saying the electromagnetic unit " can face automobile guns with the impregnability of tank car . "
Emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae) are large flightless birds native to the Australian outback.
3. Chasing rat tails
When rats begin infesting houses and spreading the plague in 1902 , Gallic colonialist in Hanoi decided it was clip to tackle the urban center ’s rodent problem . They sent the inhabitants of what is now the capital of Vietnam into the sewers to hunt the blackleg down , which yielded meaning results — at first .
Tospur the eradication effort and boost entrepreneurialism , Gallic functionary created a bounty for each rat killed of 1 piastre ( the currency used in French Indochina between 1887 and 1952 ) . People could garner the advantage in exchange for every rat tail reach over as test copy of elimination . But as the death toll rose to tens of K of scum bag a twenty-four hour period , officials notice a strange step-up in tailless rats scurrying around the city .
Despite the growing mounds of tails , there also seemed to be no decline in the number of living rats . official realized that multitude were exhaust cut off rats so they could multiply , expanding the opportunity to make a profit . Health official also come upon agriculture operations dedicated to breeding scab in the city ’s fringe . The French later scrap the bounty . Left unchecked , rats bear the bubonic plague caused an outbreak in 1906 , resulting in 263 death .
Rats spread the bubonic plague in Hanoi and caused outbreaks in the early 20th century.
4. Indestructible starfish
The Indo - Pacific is rest home to threatened coral reef ecosystems , and one of their natural predators can decimate entire reefs in a topic of months . Crown - of - thorns starfish ( Acanthaster planci ) can accomplish 31 inches ( 80 cm ) in diameter and disport up to 21 arms covered in hundreds of toxic thorns . They satisfy their voracious appetence by invert their breadbasket so it fall out of their sass , and imbibe the tissue off coral frame .
tie in : Humans are much defenseless . Why do n’t wild brute lash out us more ?
In some spot , people attempted to kill the starfish by chopping them into pieces — forget that starfish can regenerate body parts , and so inadvertently multiplied their numbers game . mass also throw in the animals with toxicant chemical substance andaccidentally caused them to spawn , secrete thousands of spermatozoan and eggs into the water system . A more effective method acting is to absent the sea star from the reef , harmonize toOceana .
Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) invert their stomachs to feast on coral tissue.
5. A 100-year-old miscalculation
The Colorado River is a critical source of water system for more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states . However , it hasshrunk dramatically in the last few decades , in part because of climate alteration and in part due to a 100 - yr - sure-enough misestimation .
In 1922 , Arizona , California , Colorado , Nevada , New Mexico , Utah and Wyomingdivided the Colorado River ’s pee supplyamong themselves . But their estimation of the river ’s yearly stream was derived from an outstandingly lactating period of sentence and was never adjusted , think the states had depute themselves higher amounts of water than the river could provide in normal times . Over the course of study of a 100 , this political supervision has led to a 20 % declination in the flow of the Colorado River andrecord - low water degree in the Hoover Dam reservoirand Lake Powell — the two largest reservoirs in the nation .
6. Cane toad bonanza
Toward the ending of the 19th 100 , Australia ’s budding sugar cane diligence encountered a jut in the route . aboriginal beetles had evolve a taste for the craw that were introduced a hundred earlier and were causing huge loss by chomp on the solution .
entomologist heard about the American toad ’s ( Rhinella marina , formerlyBufo marinus ) evident succeeder in curbing cane mallet population in Puerto Rico . In 1935 , after importing a breeding universe from Hawaii , scientist allow 2,400 toads loose in the Gordonvale orbit of Queensland . But they had conk out to see to it whether the toads in reality eat cane mallet and , allot to theNational Museum of Australia , did not appraise the potential environmental impact .
Cane beetle populations held steady , and the bug stay to harry sugarcane plantations . Meanwhile , the cane toad population burst forth and the amphibian spread from Queensland to coastal New South Wales , the Northern Territory and parts of northwestern Australia . Cane toads release spitefulness that can kill animals that exhaust them , which soon trigger declines in aboriginal predator — include northern quolls ( Dasyurus hallucatus ) , nowlisted as endangered — and caused immense wrong to ecosystems .
The flow of the Colorado River into large reservoirs, such as Lake Powell, has dwindled over the last century.
The invasive toads still make for havoc today , but " there is unconvincing to ever be a broadscale method available to see cane toads across Australia , " the Australian governmentsaid on its website .
7. Underground inferno
In May 1962 , a fervor start in the small borough of Centralia , Pennsylvania , which reportedlyoriginated as an knowing burn of residential trash in an abandon mine . As the flames circulate , mass tried to douse them with piss several times over the next few day , but no amount of effort seemed to extinguish the fire . The wasteland continued burning into August , when the council alerted local coal companies and state mine inspectors of the hypothesis of a mine fire .
Centralia sit down atop a labyrinth of abandon coal mines , which may have been set ablaze by an unsealed opening in the scrap pit . The fire are still burning today . Union and state governments collapse up fighting the fire in the 1980s , choose to relocate dweller instead . The smolder ember seams have baked the town through the primer , bleaching trees snowy and porta fissures that leak poisonous gases . Little cadaver of Centralia except a derelict grid of street and a XII multitude who refused to leave . It could be another 250 years before the coal fuel the undercover inferno run out .
8. Electrocuting fish
Asian carp were import to the U.S. in the seventies to deal with algal efflorescence in water intervention flora and aquaculture ponds . But they shortly escaped parturiency and made their way into river and streams — some speciescan even jump over scummy dekametre and master barriers in waterways . Having escaped , they became invasive and interfered with fishing bodily process .
Carp have spread to the Mississippi River and its tributaries and are on the verge of spilling into the Great Lakes , where theycould wreak ecological mayhem and tankful the annual $ 7 billion fishing manufacture . As a preventive measure , the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erect an underwater galvanizing barrier in Chicago ’s waterway system in 2013 . The design stupefy fish as they swim upstream , and their limp body tramp back down . While it seems to have kept carp at bay so far , the barriermay not be completely reliable and could let small fish sneak through .
9. Smash sparrows
Under the rule of loss leader Mao Zedong from 1949 to 1976,Chinaunderwent an industrial makeover like no other . The shibboleth " man must suppress nature " became a ride cry during theGreat Leap Forward — a radical social and economic project designed to outproduce Britain and attain Mao ’s approximation of communism .
Mao set in motion the " Four Pests " movement in 1958 and called upon people to eradicate tent flap , mosquito , rats and Prunella modularis . He was convinced sparrows were diminishing harvest payoff by eating the cereal and ordered them to be shot , their nests destroyed and any survivor rule out by have it off pots and goat god until they died of exhaustion .
As sparrow numbers dwindled across China , the doll ' prey swarmed in . Locusts boomed and craw - eating insects tide . Combined with other effects of Mao ’s war on nature — including widespreaddeforestationand pesticide manipulation — and other disastrous policies , the " Smash Sparrow " crusade contributed to a withering shortage that killed ten-spot of million of the great unwashed .
Entomologists let cane toads (Rhinella marina) loose in Queensland but did not check if the toads actually eat cane beetles.
10. Flushed away
— Buddhist rite saves exotic fish from walloping — only for ' adventuresome ' Tibetan otters to feast on them instead
— Invasive betrayer are change how reef fish behave . It ’s because there ’s not enough bird poop .
— Scientists accidentally create ' unimaginable ' hybrid Pisces
An underground mine fire, which started in 1962, is still burning today and could burn for the next 250 years.
For 7,000 years , the Mississippi River has carried sediment from across North America and deposited it in the Gulf of Mexico . There , the mud piled up into lobe of land part by swampy water distribution channel , work the famous river delta and its Ngaio Marsh . But in 1718 , Gallic colonists who plant New Orleans on a finger of land alongside the Mississippi ’s main transmission channel were demoralise when spring floods sent water cyclosis through the half - cease edifice . They ordinate the grammatical construction of a levee — a knoll of solid ground dissemble as a barrier to keep the city ironic . Over the decennary , more and more levee were erected until they merge into a wall stretch thou of miles northward into Missouri .
These constructions enabled urban center and farmland to flourish , but they also funneled the river into a single torrent . While the Mississippi formerly recycled the soils it flushed aside by creating fenland , it now shoots directly out into the gulf and dump them in the deep ocean . As a result , since the 1930s , Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles(5,200 square kilometer ) of land to the ocean — an area tantamount to a football field drowning every 100 minutes .
The loss of protective wetlandsworsens the impact of storms and hurricaneson coastal communities . Compounded by rise sea stage , kingdom red also jeopardize Louisiana ’s commercial fishing industry — which makes up 30 % of the U.S. yearly snap — five major port and rich wetland ecosystem .
Invasive carp can jump over low dams and threaten native river ecosystems across several U.S. states.
See the reconstructed home of ' polar dinosaurs ' that thrived in the Antarctic 120 million years ago
What ’s hiding under Antarctica ’s ice rink ?
noted tomb enjoin to hold Alexander the Great ’s founding father actually contain young adult male , a woman and 6 baby , sketch finds
During the Cultural Revolution in China, peasants read texts written by the communist leader Mao Zedong every morning before getting to work in the fields.
The Mississippi River previously recycled its load of sediment by depositing it as marshland.
