Nutria numbers are declining with California killing program
California may be winning its five-year, $13 million battle with nutria — the 20-pound, orange-toothed swamp rodents that biologists once feared would play hell with wetlands, flood-control levees and the state’s water-delivery system. … [Valerie Cook, who runs the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s nutria eradication program] said her team is seeing nutria numbers declining, and they’ve managed to keep them out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California’s most important waterway. Scientists who deal with invasive pests were first alarmed when nutria — a beagle-sized rodent native to the wetlands of South America — were spotted in a private duck-hunting marsh in the spring of 2017 near the farming community of Gustine in Merced County.