Feral chicken are known in several places. They can be pretty successful and have been signaled as threats to ecosystems and crops in archipelagos like Hawaii and Bermuda. But I’ve thinking about Brasil: Given the sheer amount of chicken being bread there, the presence of the Amazon rainforest, which has a similar climate to whence jungle fowls, the chicken’s ancestors come; and its already fragilized ecosystem, isn’t there a specific risk there ? So far, I’ve seen no South American country listed as famous for feral chicken presence . But hypothetically, if a few millions of fowls escaped a massive Brasilian farm and swarmed the Amazon; what could happen ? Would they quickly die off, due to having lost adaptations to wildlife, having an insufficient ratio of roosters and facing many predators ? Would they outcompete one or two local bird species and steal their niche, but otherwise fit fine in the food chain without further disrupting the ecosystem? Or would it spell a great ecological catastrophy ?
The jaguar and anaconda population would increase for a few generations, but it would balance it out after a while.
Why do you think feral chickens are a concern? Most chicken farms in Brazil are much farther from the Amazon, the deforestation land is mostly used to grow soy for animal feed.
BassTurd@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Feral chickens on the island if Kauai have no natural predators, so they are able to thrive in the wild. That is not the same in the rainforest, so I’m guessing no.
Vilian@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
shit man, put that chicken in there and only think you gonna do is make a few big cats, snakes, crocodile happier, also birds, even native people, hell even insects, if that chicken never encountered scorpions, they don’t have immunity to the sting like others chickens
loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Yeah, you might be right, byt just to feed the debate I’ll take the defense of the chicken :
-[Tinamus](en.wikipediaorg/wiki/White-throatedₜᵢₙₐₘₒᵤ?wₚᵣₒᵥ₌… while very var from chicken classification-wise (and closer to ostriches), fill a very similar niche and have a similar lifestyle to jungle fowls, also being very poor flyers. This proves that this type of lifestyle can also work in the Amazon. And with tinamu populations being destabilized by deforestation, and chicken being more adapted to a variety of lifestyles, they could outcompete them and steal their niche.