Swamp rats from the south threaten our way of life

We noted the arrival of some new water rat to the Seattle area on Friday, but after every single newspaper in the entire free world printed the AP story about it over the weekend maybe we should note it again. We're also going to note that nearly everyone who printed the article was fine with the AP headline, "South American Rodents Found in Seattle." Descriptive, but not all that punchy. You know, fine for the AP and thirty other newspapers around the world, but not quite up to Fox News standards. Fox had to modify rodents and spice up the verb a bit --"Ravenous South American Rodents Invade Washington State Lake". They INVADED. Personally Seattlest wonders if some editor at Fox News mistakenly thought he was heading an article on immigration when he wrote this.

And now back to the the shallow pretence for that joke: A nutria is a 20 lb aquatic rat that eats a quarter of its own weight in vegetation a day, burrows through levies and never learns English. Apparently they're a problem. Ed Cunningham, an educator and a trapper (we need more of those) caught nine of these near Lake Washington in February and March and suggests sterile alligators might be the only solution. An Invasive Species Council was recently created in Washington state to deal with the likes of the nutria, but that's news to them according to their website. Our fate may rest in Ed Cunningham's capable hands.

From this:

The North American Nutria was brought to the US by businessmen who felt that nutria fur would be in great demand in the future. However, the demand for the pelts of Nutria never came to fruition, and consequently, the nutria were then freed into the wild by their prospective ranchers. Once in the wild, their rapid reproduction rates caused the Nutria population to increase at a very high rate, and they eventually overran the southern gulf marshes in the states of Louisiana and Texas. This overpopulation resulted in the Nutria consuming most of the available vegetation in the marshes of Texas and Louisiana, causing great damage to these marshes. This caused the Nutria to move inland to feed on the expanse of sugar and rice fields in the two states. The only hope to protect the crops of these states is that a viable market for Nutria products can be found, so that trappers will have the incentive to maintain their trapping operations, which will reduce the population, therefore reducing the damage to the crops.