Paterson's Curse

Sat, 20/09/2008 - 17:15

Little purple flower a curse for hungry pigs & horses

Paterson's curse (Echium plantagineum) – aka: ‘Salvation Jane’

The RSPCA’s Chief Veterinarian today urged horse and pig owners to monitor horse paddocks and pig yards during the drought and ensure suitable feed is available, in case the animals are tempted to eat the weed Paterson’s curse.

Dr Mark Lawrie said the humble little purple flower, which is now flowering across broad areas of southern NSW, can cause immense suffering and in some cases death in horses and pigs. He said animals belonging to hobby farmers are particularly at risk.

“Hobby farmers often don’t have the time to monitor their animals’ feed properly and many do not have the experience to know the dangers of weeds like Paterson’s curse,” he said.

“It flourishes in drought times and is often the only feed available in a paddock. This innocent looking purple weed is particularly toxic before and during flowering and can find its way into hay and grain supplies from affected areas.”

Dr Lawrie said while the plant is pretty and bees flourish on it, Paterson’s curse can cause liver damage in horses or pigs because they can’t digest it properly.

“Paterson’s curse really is a curse. The animals can die a slow and painful death.”

Dr Lawrie also warns owners in the northern coastal areas against leaving their horses in paddocks containing Crofton Weed, which is also toxic to horses. Livestock owners who are short of feed or requiring information on hay or grain supplies, are urged to consult their veterinarian or the DPI.

“The RSPCA, vets and DPI officers recognise farmers and graziers are going through tough times and we want to help them prevent suffering in animals.

“Help and support is available, and we encourage livestock owners to consult the experts before they turn to non-conventional forms of feed or change the animals’ diet.”

Dr Lawrie said all animals need a balanced diet suited to their species, age, condition and lifestyle.

“Sudden dietary changes and the lack of proper food can lead to tragedy, particularly if horses or pigs have little alternative other than to chew on weeds like Paterson’s Curse or Crofton Weed,” he said. “There can also be a sad outcome if hungry animals break into feed sheds or gardens to get food.”

Dr Lawrie said horses fed exclusively with grain during the drought may need lime supplements to avoid acquiring calcium deficiencies which affect their bones and teeth.

Tips on preventing the spread of Paterson’s curse, quarantining of stock etc are available on the DPI website: http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au

Michael - FCC's blog
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Michael - FCC Says:
Sun, 28/09/2008 - 00:00
Hi all,

This is the fact sheet for Paterson's Curse directly from the DPI. Interesting read.

http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/88490/patersons-cu...

Cheers
Michael
Foster Care Co.
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Michael - FCC Says:
Sat, 27/09/2008 - 23:50
Scientists break Paterson's Curse

Ref:- http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2005/s1358941.htm

Reporter: Tim Lee

First Published: 15/05/2005

JOANNE SHOEBRIDGE: Now to the purple flowering plant with a few names and a mixed reputation among Australian primary producers. Where it chokes out useful pasture or poisons live stock, it's known as Paterson's curse.

Beekeepers, who reckon it produces high-quality pollen, call it Salvation Jane or the Riverina Bluebell, while the scientists who've spent more than 30 years trying to bring it under control now reckon it's history.

TIM LEE: Though it's early summer, the rolling hills north of Albury, on the New South Wales-Victorian border, retain their spring flush. It's been a good season here for pasture, and just as well, because in a dry year, when the ground is bareF, the thin veil of purple resembles a blanket, and that picturesque purple blanket is Paterson's curse, Australia's most prolific invasive weed.

MATTHEW SMYTH: It's from Mediterranean Europe and also the Mediterranean in North Africa, so all around that Mediterranean basin, so that's where we went to look for insects that feed on it. The stories are that the Paterson family around Albury had a property and they brought it in as a garden plant. But whether that story's true or not, I don't know, but it's certainly prolific around the Riverina of New South Wales and herbarium records back up the fact that it got into the country very early on - in the 1800s - around there.

TIM LEE: In fact, the first Australian infestation of Paterson's curse was recorded south west of Sydney in 1843, ironically in the Camden Park garden of wool industry pioneers John and Elizabeth Macarthur. No-one then could have envisaged it would quickly become the scourge of the pastoral industry. It also sold through nursery catalogues in Tasmania in 1854 and Melbourne a few years later. It was recorded near Port Pirie in South Australia in 1889 and in the Albury a year later. It was here that it gained its name, escaping from the garden of the Paterson family. They lived near a busy stock route, but the curse also spread in contaminated seed. And now, throughout all of southern Australia, from Tasmania stretching to the south of Western Australia, the purple menace proliferates over some 40 million hectares. And there's only one feasible remedy - biological warfare.

KERRY ROBERTS: When you're introducing an insect into the country that doesn't exist here before, you need to give them time to catch up with Paterson's curse that's been here for over 150 years.

TIM LEE: Among the green rolling hills of Longwood in north-east Victoria there are dead stalks which have scientists flitting about with excitement. While eating their chosen fare, this is the best evidence yet that the natural insect enemies are starting to adapt to their new country.

KERRY ROBERTS: They're very active, very hard to catch and they can hop a long distance, so we're all huddled over our little nets with our heads in, trying not to let them escape.

TIM LEE: These bugs, bred from imported French parents, are being propelled into a new highly important future.

MATTHEW SMYTH: The states have all become involved and we worked together to get the insects across the country. WA, SA, NSW and Victoria are all involved in this project and getting the insects out as quickly as we can. Days like this are great. It's a great time just to meet up with old friends, catch insects, exchange knowledge. It's a great way to speed this process up.

TIM LEE: The bugs prefer a northern slope to best catch the winter sun.

KERRY ROBERTS: Definitely the aspect - early-morning sun, late-afternoon sun, just keeps their body temperature warm all day so they're actively mating and breeding and laying eggs all the time.

TIM LEE: Landholder Ray Mark is thrilled to see the transformation.

RAY MARK: Oh well, it was pretty well covered. Paterson's curse would be a metre high, I suppose, everywhere. The crown weevil eats the roots. The plant just goes rotten, it just goes black and slimy and collapses.

TIM LEE: It's taken three decades of intensive scientific work to get this far.

JIM CULLEN: The program started in about '72, '73 with the work in Europe, which is where the plant comes from, really trying to see what there was that attacked it, whether in fact there were prospects for biological control, whether, in fact, it was a weed in Europe. As the cane toad shows, importing one pest to deal with another can prove diabolical. The CSIRO narrowed the field to four natural insect predators of Paterson's curse. Finally, by 1979, convinced it would do no environmental harm, the first release of a twig mining moth took place in southern New South Wales. It proved short lived. The scientists' quest struck unlikely opposition.

NEWS REEL: In a surprising development, a small but well-organised lobby group representing just two beekeepers and two graziers succeeded in getting a High Court injunction to prevent any further distribution of the moth. They argued Paterson's curse has a number of advantages for the beekeeping industry and provides much-needed forage in the drier regions. To those groups, the plant is known as Salvation Jane and some beekeepers argued they relied solely on the high protein content of its nectar. The legal action stalled the CSIRO's work for eight years. Finally the legal challenge was quashed by an inquiry and legislation.

TIM LEE: Time and Paterson's curse had marched on, but so too had the CSIRO's entomological work in France. From eight insect agents, two even more promising insects emerged. One in particular, the flea beetle, has the scientists excited.

MATTHEW SMYTH: The first insect brought in, a leaf-mining moth, has proved to be reasonably ineffectual. Does some odd damage here and there but it's doing nothing to control the weed. Then we brought in the crown weevil which feeds in the growth point of the plant. Very, very damaging plant, but unfortunately it's quite sensitive to grazing. Because it's feeding above ground, trampling and hungry mouths will consume it.

KERRY ROBERTS: The flea beetle feeds in the root system of Paterson's curse. It looks to be a more promising agent than the crown weevil in the fact that it spends 90% of its life cycle underground, so grazing won't have anywhere near the effect on it that it has on the crown-boring weevil, so it's expected to survive a lot better in grazing situations, which is where the majority of the Paterson's curse problem occurs.

TIM LEE: The plant can set seed which is viable for at least seven years in levels of up to 20,000 per square metre. Steeper slopes such as these make chemical control difficult.

KERRY ROBERTS: That was the aim of this site when we first released it, was to set it up as a nursery, so that we can have – today we've got the state collaborators, but other days we fill it with landholders and do a lot of collecting. We've taken a lot of insects from this site that we've been able to move and set up about 30 new sites in nearby areas and as far away as Albury-Wodonga. In a few weeks' time, when I've been doing this just about every day, I can't stand the sight of flea beetles!

RAY CULLEN: They've certainly made a difference. I don't know about the rest of Australia. If it works as well around the countryside as it does here, it will be fabulous.

TIM LEE: In early spring, in southern New South Wales, on grazing land close to the Hume Highway, the emerging Paterson's curse is being undermined with devastating results.

MATTHEW SMYTH: Dead Paterson's curse. But not just one plant - we're talking about over a whole farm and we're talking about insects that are spreading 10 kilometres away from this farm. So it's control on a large scale. It's exactly what we want to see. This property, we've released three beetles that feed on the rosettes and the roots of Paterson's curse, and one of those species is doing particularly well – the flea beetle. The reason it's doing so well is (1) it likes to feed in the roots, so grazing animals don't knock it around too much, and the other thing is it's tolerant of very, very dry conditions and we've had that for the last three years here in eastern Australia and that hasn't knocked it around. Well, in a plant down here, you can see where it's physically killed it, so that's the ultimate aim of it, but where the larvae are feeding in the plant, the tissue just rots away and turns black and that's tissue that could have gone into producing seed and it now can't do that. So even if a plant doesn't die from it, the plant's smaller, weaker, and if it produces less seed, there's less Pato next year.

TIM LEE: Max Cowie has seen a transformation.

MAX COWIE: Well, when I first came here, the Paterson's curse was here and out the back where I run me main amount of stock of cattle, and the more I sprayed, the more they seemed to come. Sometimes, I was spraying twice a year because you'd miss 'em and they'd come up, and it was just disheartening to see it. No matter how hard you tried, it kept spreading, and it was moving up into the hills where I couldn't control - it's too rocky - and it was really disheartening, made life hard for me and the stock.

TIM LEE: Chemical spraying is costly, time-consuming and not always effective. It's estimated that control measures and lost production from Paterson's curse costs Australian farmers $250 million annually. In extreme cases, high toxin levels from the plant causes stock deaths.

NEWS REEL: Ruth McManus had to watch helplessly as her 8-year-old gelding Roley died from eating Salvation Jane at a property outside Canberra. Her grief is shared by many horse owners in the ACT, where Paterson's curse has officially resulted in the deaths of dozens of horses.

TIM LEE: Here, it has taken 10 often frustrating years for these insects to thrive.

MAX COWIE: We brought 'em out and we placed them just behind you there and they disappeared. There wasn't enough numbers, they didn't have enough numbers. He was very disappointed. And I'd say to him, "Oh look, don't worry about it. "Let it keep rolling, Nature takes time." Anyway, he kept bringin' 'em back and bringin' 'em back, and three years ago he came here a very excited boy. He come down from the paddock and said, "I've found 'em, I've found 'em!" He couldn't stop jumping up and down.

TIM LEE: The scientists have discovered much useful knowledge of the insects' adaptation, life cycles and rate of spread.

MAX COWIE: It's 10 kilometres of radius, roughly. It's quite remarkable. I found it outside the Tarcutta pub so they've obviously got thirsty and gone there for a drink. But yeah, it's amazed me how far they've travelled. But this year they've really had to travel away from my place because they've eaten their food supply out and they've had to go looking.

KERRY ROBERTS: There's four different insects and they're not all gonna work in all areas, so particularly the drier areas, this one's not going to be a great one to use, but then it does a lot better in situations where there's fairly high-level grazing, whereas some of the other insects don't. So I think a combination of them all is where we'll get the best control, but some of them aren't going to work in all the areas.

TIM LEE: The insects' natural rate of spread is about one kilometre a year. Human help is expediating that.

KERRY ROBERTS: How we do that in Victoria is I invite landholders from areas where there are no insects being released to come to sites like this one here, spend a few hours collecting and then they take their little box of insects back to their own property and we provide them with advice and information on how to best get them established and how to look after them initially so that they can spread and start having an impact on the curse on their own properties.

KEN HENRY: We've got at least three of the agents fairly well established in Adelaide in SA. We still have one more to do a little bit work on, but it's a long haul - biological control is a long haul - and it's going to take time. I think if we can give farmers another tool in their weed management program, I think we're well under way of achieving something.

PAUL SULLIVAN: This is very exciting. We've been looking at getting these agents, the flea beetle, going for a number of years now and this is one of the better release sites. The agents are now collectable and it's much cheaper and much more efficient if we can collect from the field, and this afternoon we'll probably collect from this field as much as what NSW would be able to rear in their glasshouses in 12 months. Paterson's curse goes right across from southern Queensland right across southern Australia, into WA, but NSW would probably have over half the area of Paterson's curse in Australia.

ALAN LORD: It does cover quite a large area in WA, from Perth out to Northam, south to Albany and north to Geraldton, and obviously it's just getting worse. If this sort of thing doesn't occur, well, Paterson's curse is just going to continue to increase its range as the years go by. This one in particular, the flea beetle, is going very well in Western Australia. I think we establish it at 94% of the sites we release it at. So it's going very well. It's our best one. I think most farmers are aware of the problems with Paterson's curse and do their best to limit it, but once it's spread all over your property, I mean, you know, you're fighting a bit of a losing battle to try and eliminate it.

TIM LEE: I guess you fellas must hate the sight of that purple flower in spring, do you?

ALAN LORD: Nightmares about it.

PAUL SULLIVAN: I don't know about hate it, but it sort of gets up your nose a bit, I guess, when you see it being sold in shops and that and being promoted as Riverina Bluebell when you know what devastation it costs to farmers and how it can nearly put them out of business, so it's a particularly nasty weed.

ALAN LORD: It's just good after all these years to see this sort of thing going on and how farmers and landowners can come out here themselves and collect the insects and take back to their farms. I mean, that's what we've been aiming at all these years.

MATTHEW SMYTH: We're only still talking a handful of sites where we're starting to see plant death but we're seeing more and more of it each year. So I think we're slowly going to get there. You know, who knows how long? We suspect it's going to be more like 20, 30 years before you're seeing widespread control of Paterson's curse, but locally at the paddock and farm level we're starting to see it already.

KERRY ROBERTS: This the fantastic side of it, after 10 years, after really not knowing just how well they're going to work, to get to the point now where we can look at a paddock and say the Paterson's curse is gone from here because of these insects is amazing - yeah, very satisfying.

MATTHEW SMYTH: You know, they work while you sleep, there's no compo to pay for 'em, they just do it, year in, year out, day in, day out - great! And as you can see, it's targeted. All this pasture species are completely unaffected. They just want the Paterson's curse. It's exactly what we want.

MAX COWIE: You just can't believe how it takes the weight off your shoulders that something like this is going to help the whole of Australia. Not just me, it will - whether you like it or not, if you like Paterson's curse, it's too late. They're here to stay
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Paterson's Curse

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