Louisiana was losing a football field of marshland every hour, and the unlikely fix involved the American alligator, a predator once hunted to near extinction. The real culprit was nutria, invasive rodents that devoured the dense root mats holding wetland soil together, turning vegetated marsh into open water.
Louisiana’s coastal wetlands were eroding rapidly, and an invasive rodent species was making the damage significantly worse. By the mid-20th century, the state was losing a football field of marshland every hour, in part because nutria, large semi-aquatic rodents imported from South America, were destroying the root systems that held the soil together. The solution that eventually stabilized the c…