Hogs

Hogs Feral hogs were first introduced to the United States in 1493 on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the new world. They were brought with other livestock to be used for food, but they soon escaped captivity. These animals were reported to be very aggressive and attacked Spanish soldiers. There numbers now exceed 2 million in the U.S. The effect of the introduced species would later have a detrimental effect on the many different ecosystems they encountered. Since hogs are omnivores, they can have a variety of effects on many different animals from amphibians to mammals. Feral pigs eat a variety of items, including fruits, roots, mushrooms, and invertebrates, depending on the season. The major foods in spring are herbage, roots, invertebrates, and vertebrates. Fruit, invertebrates, and herbage are most common in fall and winter diets. Herbage eaten by feral pigs includes water hyssop, pennywort, frog fruit, spadeleaf, onion, and various grasses while important roots used for food include bulrush, cattail, flatsedges, and spikesedges. Fruits and seeds such as grapes, acorns, and cultivated sorghum are important, and animal matter ingested by feral pigs includes earthworms, marsh fly larvae, leopard frogs, snakes, and rodents. Feral hogs as hogs, feral, hog, pigs, animals, door, very, population, trap, swine, species, control, brucellosis, wild, soil, infected, disease, best, wildlife, states, small, roots, populations, native, method, lift, food, effects, effective, effect, eat, been, wire, water, spring