🔬 Science 10h ago · Natural History

By 1921, trappers had leased 23 Aleutian islands and stocked them mainly with arctic foxes to be caught later for their fur. The foxes fed on the seabirds the refuge was supposed to protect, leaving the government to spend decades undoing an industry it had encouraged.

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By 1921, 23 of the Aleutian Islands had been leased and stocked mainly with arctic foxes. The foxes were released so that trappers could return later and take their fur. Over the next two decades, nearly 27,000 fox pelts were pulled from 86 islands. The catch is where those islands sat: on land already set aside as a wildlife refuge.
The Aleutians became a refuge in 1913 and even after that the fox farming continued. The tidy picture a lot of us might carry, foxes as an invasive accident that sl

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