I live in a small city in the US, where it’s grass everywhere. There’s lots of rabbits, but why aren’t there more? They eat grass, and there’s clearly more grass than they can eat at their current population size. There’s no significant predators to speak of, I don’t think. They breed legendarily quickly, there’s even an expression about it. So if food isn’t a constraint, predators aren’t a constraint, what is the constraint? I would think they should just increase population until we don’t have to cut our grass anymore.
In: Biology
Do you have Calicivirus and Rabbit haemorrhagic disease in the US?
No disagreement with what everyone else has said, but you cannot underestimate the extent to which little suburban rabbits are just dumb as fuck.
The last ten years or so we’ve had between 3 and 5 Swedish vallhunds (think corgis but different) at our house at any given time. The thing I want you to get from this is that even though we keep up with the dookie, it should NOT BE SUBTLE to a wee critter that several dogs live in our yard.
At our old place, a couple of times an adult rabbit got killed because it forgot where it had entered the yard and just ran around and around and around and around and around in biiiiig circles until Tish finally caught up and snapped its neck. What I ended up having to do there was go out on the porch myself and shine a light around to see if there were stupid dumbfuck bunnies, and if there were I’d stomp around in the yard waving my arms and insulting them. They still wouldn’t leave. I’m there trying to prevent them from dying that night and no they’re just DERP DEE DERP I’LL HOP EIGHT FEET THIS WAY THAT’S FINE.
Another time at that house rabbits laid a clutch of eggs in the yard. Again, yard full of dogs. That must surely smell of doggos and dog pee if you’re a rabbit. Big huge flashing neon sign that says PREDATORS HERE STAY AWAY. And sure enough the dogs find the nest and start pulling the baby rabbits out and eating them. The best part was me running over to dissuade Alice from this (don’t want her to get sick) and her reaction was OH SHIT THE COPS and she ate them faster. I would not pinky-swear that all of them were dead before they hit her stomach. Same thing happened at the new place.
rabbits breed a lot precisely because they die a lot and need to maintain population. If rabbits bred out of control, they would starve themselves out of their environment and then die out.
Fun fact: this mechanism is what let chickens become easily domesticated. Wild chicken populations would explode when food was plentiful and would shrink when food was scarce. Ancient humans figured out that if you kept giving them food, they would just keep producing offspring. It was the ultimate chicken engine.
One reason is it goes i cycles, more rabbits leads to more predators witch leads to less rabbits which leads to less predators which leads to more rabbits…
But I get your point my backyard backs on to greenspace. It could support so many rabbits, and predators seem limited but to exist
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