Fur For Fish

Trapping

Louisiana is trying to create markets for wild nutria, partly to put the lush beaverlike fur to use warming human bodies, and partly to reduce damage to coastal marshes.

The nutria is a South American rodent with webbed feet, similar to an otter. Louisiana’s nutria are descended from 150 animals that escaped their pen during a hurricane in 1940.

They eat marsh plants, including the roots, and are capable of destroying vegetated wetlands.

“Our productive nearshore and offshore is a direct result of vegetated wetlands. You’re talking about a threat to a billion-dollar seafood industry,” said Greg Linscombe of the Fur and Alligator Council.

“When we did have prices, at the end of the ‘70s market was worth over $25 million to 10,000 trappers,” Linscombe said. “A portion of that, probably 20 or 25 percent, went back to the landowner as payment for permission to trap. Even major land companies, if the surface of the land is going to make money for them, they are going to protect that surface.”

From the 1960s into the 1980s, when there was high demand from West Germany, trappers took 1 million to 1.5 million pelts a year. But the harvest fell to 130,000 a year in the 1990s.

“We need to take a million,” Linscombe said. “But we feel if we can get the harvest to 500,000, we believe we could stop the majority of the vegetative damage.”