Story & Photos by Tess Jewell-Larsen
When Princess Buttercup and the dashing Westley make their way through the Fire Swamp, Princess Buttercup cautions Westley about the R.O.U.S., Rodents of Unusual Size, but Westley dismisses them as fable. Just then, one jumps out and attacks the couple. While the R.O.U.S. of William Goldman’s Princess Bride might indeed be fictional, it is easy to pinpoint a real-life relative: nutria.
Myocastor coypus, also know as nutria, is a member of the rodent family native to South America. Despite its family tree, the nutria is much larger than an average alley-scurrying rat and from a distance can often be mistaken for a beaver. The nutria give-away: a rat-like, round and hairless tail that extends from its body at an average of twelve to seventeeninches.
The nutria was imported into the U.S. as early as 1899 to be kept on farms as a cheaper alternative to beaver furs. The farms became more popular in the 1930s as the cheaper product came into demand. The pelts and fur never really took off though, and many people in the fur-trade world often described the nutria as, “the poor younger brother of the rich strong beaver,” as noted by Agnes C. Laut in her book, The Fur Trade of America. The use of the fur, however, has recently come back into style as nutria fur is now being marketed as “guilt free” fur.
Unfortunately, as the fur trade declined these large, semi-marine rodents managed to escape, or were let loose, and ever since have enjoyed their freedom by wreaking havoc on the environment.
“They do significant property damage,” says Ryan Turner, who does maintenance of the open waterways systems for the Eugene Parks and Open Spaces. “From my perspective the main thing that they do is burrow into the channel banks and they create kind of a Swiss cheese effect of voids in the soil and cause the channel bank to actually fall into the creek.”
There has been no monetary value placed on the damage done by nutria, says Brian Wolfer, a biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife from the Springfield office. Because nutria are an unprotected species, Wolfer says, people with nutria problems “do not call back every year” because they often take care of the problem themselves after they find out they do not need county or state approval to get rid of them. This makes it difficult to collect an overall monetary value of damage caused by the rodent.
Because of the damage nutria cause along the waterways and the destruction of personal gardens, people do not tend to mind the euthanization of nutria, says Lloyd Walker of Swanson’s Pest Management. “It’s not like [when] people see the cute, cuddly pictures of raccoons and they’re like, ‘aw we don’t want to hurt them.’” With the nutria they just see a huge eighteen-pound rat.
“When I saw one close up, it had the yellowist teeth I’ve ever seen in my life,” Kara Soulas of the Alpha Phi Sorority house says. “There are a lot of [nutria] that run around here.”
”I feel like in order to regulate the [nutria] population we need to find out what the predators are of nutria and get those here,” Soulas adds.
 
The main predator for nutria – other than cars – is the otter. “About four years ago we were getting a lot of otter sightings in the Amazon [Creek] which was pretty exciting ‘cause otters are native and they’re carnivores,” Turner says.  “A co-worker of mine witnessed an otter killing a nutria which was probably a well established fact, but we hadn’t really realized that that dynamic was happening in our system.”
Turner and the Parks and Open Spaces crew of Eugene are hoping there may be a correlation between the reduced nutria population in the Amazon area and the otters.
Unlike the R.O.U.S. of the Princess Bride, nutria do not have the luxury of living in a Fire Swamp where there are natural deterrents against predators – human or otherwise.

Gallery • 6 Photos

Rodents Of Unusual Size: They Do Exist