The story of Easter Island needs a rewrite. According to a study in the Journal of Archaeological Science, humans weren’t solely to blame for the disappearance of trees on the remote Pacific island. Rats played a pivotal role too.
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is famed for two things. Its iconic moai statues, and the story which tells how calamity ensued after its inhabitants cut down the trees they needed to survive. Today, the Moai still stand, but the story is falling to pieces.
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According to the study’s authors, Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt, before human settlers arrived, Easter Island was dominated by a unique species of large palm, which could live for half a century, but took 70 years to mature. Then around 1200 CE, the Polynesians arrived with various non-native species, including sweet potatoes which they farmed, and Polynesian rats, which they ate.
The rats, however, cut loose and made themselves at home in the canopy, where they feasted on the palm trees’ fruit. “Palm nuts are rat candy,” says Lipo. "The rats went bananas.” With no native predators to control their numbers, the Polynesian rat population boomed. Within 50 years, there were 11 million rats and an estimated 95% of the palms’ seeds had been eaten.
The slow-growing palm tree didn’t stand a chance. To compound the problem further, Polynesian settlers cut down palm trees to establish their sweet potato fields and burned patches of forest to make ash for fertiliser.
The palms struggled to regenerate, and over the next 450 years, 20 million trees were lost. By the time the Europeans arrived with their sheep, in the early 16th century, few palms were left. Then the sheep ate the remaining saplings, and the species went extinct.
Contrary to the popular narrative, however, this wasn’t the island’s death knell. “It’s a sad loss of a palm forest, but it wasn’t a disaster for the people,” says Lipo.
Settlers didn’t use the soft timber to roll the moai into place, nor use it to build houses or canoes. They survived on the plants that they grew, until a mixture of newly introduced diseases and slaving practices – Peruvians forcibly removed a third of the island’s population in the 19th century - caused the population to crash.
The Polynesian rats, meanwhile, suffered the same fate as the palms they destroyed. They too were destroyed by a non-native species, when they were outcompeted by the Norwegian rats brought to the island by European settlers.
Top image: Easter Island. Credit: Getty
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