This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Over the summer of 1983–84, a fungus called Phragmidium violaceum was introduced to Australia. It was done secretly, deliberately and illegally.
And it was done for one purpose: to kill blackberry plants. I'm a historian, not a detective. My recent research on the illicit introduction of violaceum (also known as 'blackberry rust'), published in History Australia, doesn't identify a culprit.
But it does shed light on one of Australia's most significant and mysterious breaches of biosecurity over the past half-century. Like so many other animals and plants, blackberry was deliberately introduced to Australia from Britain. The earliest records date to the 1840s.
The plant was valued for its abundance of juicy fruit as well as for its uses as a hedge. Few herbivores other than tough-lipped deer and goats can eat the thorny plant. But its delicious berries are prized by all sorts of animals, from foxes to fairywrens.
With the help of humans and animals, blackberry spread rapidly. By the late 1880s, it was becoming recognized as a serious agricultural weed. Unchecked, it forms dense, thorny thickets that are hard to reclaim as farmland.
When official control efforts began in the 1890s, they had little effect on the tough plant. But agricultural scientists were determined to find a solution—even if it took decades. In the interwar period, Australian scientists found a neat remedy for a far worse weed—prickly pear, an introduced cactus carpeting vast areas of pasture in New South Wales and Queensland.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
