Gustine, Merced County —About the size of a beagle, they can quickly turn a lush green marsh to a wasteland. They use their long orange teeth to gnaw through vegetation and reach the succulent bits they crave.

Females can have litters of a dozen or more and become pregnant within 48 hours after giving birth, their fertility adding to the speed with which this South American rodent can fan across a landscape, burrowing into levees and and destroying wetlands along the way.

They are called nutria, and right now they’re starting to spread through the waterways leading into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the ecologically fragile network of sloughs and rivers that functions as the heart of California’s flood-control and water distribution system. The first ones were discovered last year in Merced County. Since then, at least two dozen more have been found there and in Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Fresno counties.

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