Can anyone help me identify/remember a short story I read once in Omni magazine? It would have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and was about a human settlement on another planet populated by friendly, ever so helpful natives. The settlement was afflicted by some pest or other, and the aliens brought them another animal that would eat the pest, which it did, but it in turn started causing problems, and so then the aliens brought another lifeform that—you see where this is going, of course.
Anyway, was trying to remember it to make a reference to it, and of course I can’t remember the author or the title, and googling “omni fiction human settlers pest” hasn’t gotten me very far.
(Any SF fans following me who are too young to have known the glossy, weird magazine that was Omni—you missed out. That magazine introduced me to a lot of important SF writers when I was a teen. William Gibson recalls getting paid $2000 by them for one of his short stories. A colossal sum by any standard, more so when you recall this was in early 1980s dollars. The thing is, founder Kathy Keeton’s co-founder and husband was Bob Guccione, who published Penthouse. So, there was cash backing aplenty, because pre-internet nudie magazines. Anyway, the Omni Reboot site gives a taste of what it was, but I will always be fond of the slick magazine printed on shiny paper—there was metallic ink on some pages, impossible to read in low light—that I talked my parents into getting me a subscription for, largely on the grounds that it was about science. Which was…loosely true. But I’d say I got a pretty good education out of it, even if it wasn’t the one I sold my parents on.)
There is an effort at a complete index of OMNI at:
http://omnimagindex.wordpress.com/
and the Internet Archive has the full text of the complete run:
https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine
sorry, that’s as close as I can get. I have a vague recollection of the story you seek. I was able to get my parents to gift me a subscription too. They supported any and all reading habits.