Surely Professor Carl Jones, a conservation biologist who often clashes with fellow environmentalists, felt at least a twinge of the old schadenfreude as he describes some of his conservation work on Mauritius:
The original grazers had been giant tortoises, until they went extinct. So I figured we should introduce Aldabra giant tortoises. They were a different species, but it seemed to me they would do the same job. When I talked to my friends about this, they all thought I was mad. “How do you know they will be an exact fit?” they asked. Botanists were literally purple with rage, saying the tortoises would eat critically endangered plants. I said: “Sure, that’s the idea. Your plants won’t survive unless tortoises graze on them.”
We conducted some studies that showed tortoises would do far more good than harm. It turned out that the seeds of endemic plants that passed through a tortoise’s gut germinated far better than if they hadn’t. After the [Mauritian Wildlife Foundation] restored the tortoises, the native plants started to come back.
“Kestrel manoeuvres in the dark,” NewScientist (3 September 2016)
