Japan's famous 'rabbit island' is home to 900 wild bunnies — but tourists are bringing so much food to the island that the animals now face a life-threatening crisis

• A popular tourist attraction in Japan known as the "rabbit island" is seeing a surge in predators.

• Tourist food leftovers are drawing rats, crows, and wild boars from neighboring islands.

• The 900 rabbits are not native to Ōkunoshima, but attract 100,000 tourists to the island every year.

Ōkunoshima, also known as "rabbit island", is a popular tourist attraction in Japan with over 100,000 visitors every year.

Less than 44 miles away from Hiroshima, tourists flock to the island for its beaches, hot springs, and most importantly its wild rabbits.

Known for being home to over 900 adorable wild bunnies, the island's fluffy residents are now facing a life-threatening crisis.

Tourists visiting the island have been bringing too much food to feed the rabbits and often leaving the leftovers behind. The leftovers have started to attract predators from nearby shores. Due to a significant number of visitors ignoring city administrators' feeding guidelines, some of the rabbits are also weak and unwell from being fed the wrong diet. Tourists often offer lettuce and carrots, instead of the pelleted food, grass, and vegetables that they should be eating.

With the surge in aggressive wildlife such as rats, crows, and even wild boars on the island, the vulnerable population of rabbits are forced to both rival the smaller species for food, and the bigger species for their lives.

The rabbits biggest enemy are the "jungle crows", which are known to be very aggressive, according to Kevin Short, a professor of cultural anthropology at Tokyo University of Information Studies, as told to SCMP.

"These crows would have no problem at all in killing a weak or young rabbit, and I'd suggest they would be able to swallow a newborn rabbit whole," Short told SCMP.

But the rabbits are not native to Ōkunoshima either, Short said. In the 1900s, the island was where a factory manufacturing lethal gases for armed forces used to be.

The bunnies only began appearing on the island in the 1970s.

Some believe that the wild bunnies descended from a small fluffle of eight bunnies that some school children released in 1971. Others say that the bunnies' ancestors were World War II test subjects.

If not for being so adorable and huge contributors to the local tourism industry, Short believes that the rabbits would likely be viewed as an invasive species like the other predators, as per the law in Japan.

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