Kiore.com

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- A University of Hawaii anthropologist and colleagues are blaming rats and Dutch traders for the mysterious abandonment of Easter Island.

Nearly all Polynesians on the South Pacific island, who built hundreds of 10-ton stone statues, inexplicably vanished. Conjecture has included the natives deforested the island to transport the statues, triggering catastrophic erosion, USA Today reported. According to the theory, the remaining inhabitants then were decimated during a cannibalistic civil war in about 1650.

Read more »

The ABC's Catalyst program recently ran a segment on Kiore.

Contributors include Dr Lisa Matisoo-Smith and Hori Parata

"Here, written in the rats DNA, was the untold story of the Maori's last migration.

"It began on a small island in Indonesia. From there, rats were carried by the Polynesians ancestors into the Pacific.

"But then; a huge surprise. There wasn't one launching point to New Zealand, there were two; the Cook Islands and the society islands."

Transcript ...

Kiore colonised Lizard Island, Mokohinau Group (outer Hauraki Gulf) in the mid 1970s, and were subsequently removed by poisoning in 1978. Studies of lizard and bird populations before, during and after the kiore occupancy provide direct evidence of the effects of kiore on an offshore island's fauna.

Read more »

In a paper by C. R. Veitch from the Department of Conservation, there is discusion of the eradication of Kiore from Tititiri Matangi Island.

Full abstract included

Read more »

A year ago life for Cook’s petrel chicks on Little Barrier (Hauturu) was bleak and short lived. Now, less than a year after the operation to rid the island of rats, most chicks have survived to fly from their burrows.

Monitoring this summer has shown that 70 percent of the Cook’s petrel chicks fledged. In previous years as few as five percent survived when up to 95 percent of chicks were killed by kiore or Pacific rat, leaving the sea bird population in a downward spiral.

Read more »