He gestures with his cigarette at a ragged stretch of half-eaten Blackwater salt marsh over the bow. You might not see nutria very often, but their signs are everywhere their tracks, their droppings. They are devastating habitat for rare native species like bald eagles and eliminating nurseries for the crabs and oysters that have paid the mortgages of tidewater families for generations. Gnaw, Let s Eat Out Nutria scatter into the heart of a wetland and randomly chew into its thick carpet of starchy roots. Biologists call those eat-outs.
Aerial photos show the marsh damage blistering until the eat-outs merge into open bays.
Then saltier water from the Chesapeake seeps in with the tide, strangling stands of loblolly pine and accelerating erosion. It s a cancer, said refuge biologist Keith Weaver. To these researchers, the only question is how best to kill nutria. One agency posts Cajun recipes on its Internet site. A sheriff s SWAT team blasts the rodents for nocturnal target practice.