Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
3741 T.B., SRS57/1 Item 26, Queensland Primary Production, Industry, Architecture, Views
and People (Photograph Albums), Cairns and District - Barron Falls, Kuranda, Green Is.,
Atherton Tableland, Malanda, Port Douglas, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane
Overgrazing by introduced goats
Significant destruction of native island vegetation occurred at many islands of
the Great Barrier Reef due to the introduction of goats (
Capra hircus
). Many
documentary sources and oral history sources provide evidence of the damage to
of goats at Brampton, South Percy and North Keppel Islands, acknowledging that
the animals altered the vegetation of those islands over a period of eighty years:
reducing the cover of grass and heath species and creating scalds. In turn, those
impacts exacerbated erosion and facilitated the spread of exotic plant species.
Brennan (1988) argued that the impacts of goats were greater on oceanic, rather
than continental, islands, because the biota of the former are more susceptible
to disturbance. The evidence presented here suggests that, even on continental
islands, the presence of goats transformed island landscapes, and native vegetation
was able to recover only after the goat populations had been eradicated.
Goats were introduced to Great Barrier Reef islands for several reasons. During
the period of early European exploration of the Great Barrier Reef, the animals
provided a resource for shipwrecked mariners, as one oral history informant, a
zoologist, stated:
Goats were in many cases left behind by mariners. The early survey vessels
and the early guano vessels and whalers - and the guano vessels and whalers
tended to be the same vessels - left goats in a number of locations, and
coconut trees, for those reasons: that if people got shipwrecked, they had
a goat to eat and they had a coconut to provide them with some sort of a
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