AHC: Explorers bring back nightmare animal pest.

Curiousone

Banned
Europe's era of colonization was accelerated by the diseases it's explorers carried such as smallpox, killing off (unfortunately & sadly) the native inhabitants in their path who might have brought resistance to colonial expansion. Others have considered what could have happened had the disease vectors been the other way, if Native peoples had happened to have diseases that affected Europeans & a new plague been brought back on ocean going sailing vessels.

In this thread I'd like to consider the possibility of a natural animal pest having been stumbled upon & being brought back. There might be small natural examples in OTL. More specifically however given the worst aspects of the animals we know now to have been discovered or which have existed in recent pre-history, what biologically plausible creature could have existed that might have embodied them all & survived a ship voyage back? What effects might it have had?

An insect that lays it's eggs in humans for maturation? One whose lifestages mean it's nearly impossible to eradicate? That eats crops in swarms/kills livestock with it's sting?
 
Idea: Pekari move about in small groups, don't they? They are similar enough to pigs for infections to jump species. I could see some kind of infection that occasionally flares up and burns through local populations, but then dies off and lies dormant, occasionally killing isolated individuals. A mobile population like the pekari could always recover from localised near-extinction events.

When the bug is accidentally imported in the late sixteenth century (in spore form, with soil in the pots of American plants for upscale gardens in La Rochelle), it initially causes isolated outbreaks in semi-urban herds. Wfter it spreads to the population of wild boar in the Pyrenees, it starts burning through rural populations on both sides of the mounbtains, reaching the Alps five years later. Northern Europe, where pigs are penned in winter, loses almost its entire stock over the 1595-1620 period. And much fuckedness ensues.
 
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