Abbadon said:
Again, give me an example. I know rabbits, deer and a whole bunch of critturs will ring a tree, but usually not deep enough to kill it. Even then, no examples of RATS doing it.
I think the one person who made that claim retracted it and, as I've said, the issue wasn't the rats killing the
trees palms but damaging the endosperm, thus impeding the palm forests regenerative capabilities. Which is a situation common to most
if not all Polynesian Islands though on a lesser scale as a result of differing biological endowments. This is all because the
Kiore (a native to Southeast Asia) wasn't endemic to the islands it was introduced to.
But nevertheless what needs to be stressed is that no major inhabited chain of Pacific Island is in the same state it was when it was first settled. New Zealand is a good example because Maori (like moi) milled out species in inhabited areas that didn't have useful properties in favor of useful species - e.g. the Nikau palm, Ti kōuka and New Zealand flax - with the result that most of the unwanted plants are now found in areas Maori didn't reach in numbers. Europeans acknowledged this, and noted, that the bush (not forests, which are a rather different construction) were sparse and well endowed with useful plants.
The net effect of this was a variegated landscape where fields and settlements were inter-spaced with thinned New Zealand bush, heavily influenced by selective felling, burning and thinning for forage. Thus, Europeans often moved into areas that had been well shaped, and required
relatively little effort to convert to 'open' pasturage. This was a major factor in the selection of the Auckland as a site for settlement, as it had been pre-contact the most heavily populated part of Aotearoa, and thus was the most suitable for farming/settlement. (Though that simplifies the picture a fair bit).
But I digress, sufficed to say that
Kiore did (and do) have a detectable effect on Polynesian Islands and that because of rampant change in the environment of post-colonial Pacific Islands it isn't all together to reasonable, or rational, to point to the fact that other islands have trees and say "Aha,
Kiore didn't do damage!" for the simple fact that most of the slowing growing trees and palms have long been milled out and replaced with more useful, and invariably faster growing, species. This is all, of course, academic considering the species is extinct but it should be considered.
