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.
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Why do you think feral chickens are a concern?
No particular reason, chicken, ecological disasters and Brasil are just three things that have been popping in and out of my mind lately, it was only a matter of time until they combined.
The jaguar and anaconda population would increase for a few generations, but it would balance it out after a while
But would chicken still have a place in this new balance? I mean, tigers and pythons haven’t hunted the jungle fowls to extinction, nor have jaguars and anacondas done so to the unrelated, yet- similar tinamu…
In worst case scenario they would overpopulate and consume all natural resources until a majority of their population starved down to an equilibrium. Eventually there would arise some predator that would adapt to take advantage of the new food supply. This would probably take thousands of not millions of years though.
Our limited human lifespans make us succeptable to thinking in short term, in the long term it wouldn’t matter in the least bit if chickens ravaged the amazon ecosystem since it would just adapt over a relatively short time geologically. 50 thousand years is unimaginable to us but peanuts to the planet and environment. Rediculously successful organisms ravaging the environment and killing themselves off is a story as old as biology.
in 40 years when son of son of Elon Musk, Feral Chicken (Musk) takes over majority share of Amazon, i will… likely be dead, but ill be laughing from the big cloud storage in the sky.
didnt the ancestors of the chicken evolve in the rain forests of/near China? I’m sure there’s latent genes that could express themselves within a few generations - much how domesticated pigs can turn to wild hogs in just a few generations
Yeah, it’s the jungle fowls I mentioned, from southern China, india and SEA; that’s why I think they might adapt well to the rainforest climate !
