Sorry to the Guam snake post.
Has any creature, for whatever reason, successfully driven human beings from its habitat. So from a starting point of coexistence, did any organism, either through proliferation or harm to humans, manage to get the humans to leave the place?
Sharks are doing fairly well, but that has more to do with the specifics of the habitat.
In WW2, the United States tried to build an air base on the island of Ndeni, one of the Santa Cruz Islands in the South Pacific. The island was infested with malarial mosquitoes, which is not that unusual, but this particular strain of malaria affected the brain. Casualties were significant enough that the US abandoned the effort.
However, people do live on Ndeni (or Ndeno, Nendo: the island goes by several different spellings.), and modern attempts to do malaria control on the island do not mention any hyper-lethal strain of malaria.
If you count microbes, it has happened several times. Entire native American societies have collapsed due to multiple microbe plagues occurring at the same time.
As far as macro scale animals? I am not sure. Especially with today’s technology.
Snake Island, maybe.
There is an island off of the coast of Brazil, Ilha da Queimada Grande, that is so infested with deadly snakes Brazil has made it illegal to go there. Apparently it averages to one snake per square foot of the island.
So, while I do not think they eradicated humans from their habitat they have certainly kept humans out of it.
EDIT: Ninjaed
Gruinard Island would have been another, due to its being used as an anthrax test site during WW2, but it was recently decontaminated and returned to its original owners.
God only knows what’s still living on the Soviet Union’s version of it,Voronezh Island. Which is no longer an island, thanks to the destruction of the Aral Sea. Some decontamination of the island has been performed, per the wiki.
Recent estimates( and the first semi-reliable, scientific ones )indicate the real population is actually a tiny fraction of that sensationalized figure. Probably a few thousand snakes at most, not the 430,000 once claimed, and they are somewhat habitat restricted. Which makes logical sense - awful hard for a critter that feeds primarily on just two species of songbird to maintain that kind of population density.
The Champawat tiger gave it a go, killing and eating an estimated 436 people in Nepal and India between about 1900 and 1907 before finally being hunted down and killed by Jim Corbett.
Yes, the article cited above makes no sense. It says there are 2,000 to 4,000 snakes and one snake per square foot. From a Google map, I estimate an area of about five million square feet, making the density less than one thousandth of a snake per square foot.
An honourable mention must go to the Tsetse fly.
In other words, the author just went off and searched up whatever factoids they could find, without ever bothering to do any math, or to determine which factoids were more reliable.
Fair enough.
It remains a dangerous place due to critters that the Brazilian government restricts access to because of the critters.
It’s not a very good example, but in Aus, saltwater crocs are a protected species. Saltwater crocs eat people, so the effect of protection is that people either avoid estuary river edges, or get eaten. I can’t say that humans have been eradicated from the habitat though – we’re like cockroaches, and there aren’t enough crocs so that you always, or even probably get eaten-- just enough to keep the locals out of the water where there are warning signs.
The global number of fatalities due to shark attacks is insignificant, and the tiny potential danger does virtually nothing to keep people from going into the water in most places.
But they didn’t become locally extinct except perhaps in small areas. There were always some survivors, and of course Europeans and their African slaves immediately replaced the Native Americans who died.
All I know is that the amazing snakes chasing an iguana clip shows one place I would not want to live within a hundred miles of.
Warning: nightmare fuel. OTOH, David Attenborough. So it all evens out, right?
Link.
Like a literal nightmare. Very cool.
Iguana could’ve used a thumper.
I’m not sure I’d rely on Douglas Preston for factual material, but the city he describes in his book The Lost City of the Monkey God, which might be Ciudad Blanco, is in a region filled with disease-bearing mosquitos that he suggests were responsible for depopulating the city. His descriptions of his own suffering from the illness (and the pretty extreme treatment for it) are seriously wince-inducing.
Yes. As I understand it, Timbuktu is located some distance (about 8 miles) north of the Niger River (rather than right on the river) because of that fly and the sleeping sickness it transmits.