Short abstract

This paper traces the history of the Marion Island cat eradication program (1977-1993), probing the South African Apartheid-era management strategies for responding to species invasion in a biodiversity hotspot and the vexing questions this episode presents for conservation histories more generally.

Long abstract

The remote, sub-Antarctic Marion Island, an offshore territorial possession of South Africa dating back to its annexation in 1948, represents a crucial node in Southern Ocean bird and mammal ecologies. But from the early years after annexation until their full eradication in the early 1990s, a population of initially human-introduced cats roamed the island, dramatically disrupting the breeding cycles of bird species that relied on the remote island’s location in the larger Southern Ocean region. Within the South African National Antarctic Program (SANAP), the Marion Island cat eradication program has become the stuff of lore, while in the larger conservation literature, it’s noted as a particularly comprehensive success in efforts to cull an invasive mammal species. At the same time, the program represents a curious case, one in which links between invasive species management and the military language of invasion weren’t just discursive or analogical but entailed the explicit material leveraging of military capacities. Specifically, the program recruited members of South Africa’s late-Apartheid armed forces into the team of “cat hunters,” drawing on the skills these “cat hunters” had developed working to preserve white rule in Southern Africa to carry out the necro-labor of conservation. Tracing the history of the Marion Island cat eradication program, this talk asks what kinds of unsettling questions the program and its historical reception raise for thinking the socially and politically situated character of invasion and conservation science, highlighting their imbrication in this instance with the militarized socio-ecological management strategies of an Apartheid state.