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wbillingsley | 2 years ago

It depends. e.g. In Australia, the snake most people worry about (the eastern brown - world's second most venomous and common in cities) is native, so yes it's important to an ecosystem in the broader sense. But its numbers around cities have gone up because of mice, most of which are introduced, so it's a non-native part of the ecosystem that's pushing the numbers up. Doing something to bring the numbers back down around urban centres wouldn't seem like such a bad idea. Brown snakes aren't a threatened or endangered species and though cities are large human centres, they're not a large portion of the Australian geography. (And are largely artificially maintained ecosystems anyway - those houses and roads didn't appear naturally.) There are probably other ways for dealing with mice than having the world's second deadliest snake hanging around town.

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