Suppose you want to establish a wetland to clean up the water and create a bit of habitat, but before your plants can root and reproduce, something rips them out! Suppose your wetland is in a suburban or urban area where you don’t have the option of trapping, poisoning, shooting, re-fencing, and stocking with predators to deter whatever is sabotaging your wetland. (And needless to say, your wetland construction is on a budget and a deadline.) What are you going to do?
This is exactly what we’ve been working with at some of our stormwater wetland sites. The pest is nutria, a large invasive rodent with an appetite for most wetland plants. However, not all wetland plants, and that is the key to our efforts to get constructed wetlands to thrive even where nutria thrive too.
Through test plots, observation, and a few references, we are developing a list of native wetland plant species that nutria don’t seem to like eating. New wetlands will be planted heavily from this list.
Fortunately that includes some great looking plants, like Southern blue flag iris/Iris virginica with its classic blue blooms, and Common rush/Juncus effusis, which is evergreen in winter.
Interestingly, a definitive list of such species was not previously available online. In fact, this list conflicts other reports documenting certain species which have been eaten by nutria in other locations. In these cases, the size of the nutria population and the availability of other sites where nutria can forage their more preferred species is probably critical.
Some of the species on the list were included in test plots set up, planted, and monitored at CCISD’s Education Village in League City.
Although this list is exclusively species indigenous to the upper Texas coastal prairie, you probably wouldn’t find this assemblage in nature. However, it can provide the coverage needed for a treatment wetland.
If you have other observations, or results from this plant list, we’d like to hear from you!
John Jacob
Steven Mikulencak
Charriss York
Watershed Texas 
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