Comments on: Invaders Settle In

By: Sunday Links « The Oyster’s Garter

Sunday Links « The Oyster’s Garter — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:31:49 +0000

[...] Are invasive species are harmful as they appear to be? Carl Zimmer sums up the evidence. [...]

By: DGS

DGS — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:22:35 +0000

Quite frankly, doug l, I’m horrified by Loren Eisley’s behavior. He went beyond imposing an aesthetic interpretation, he was imposing an aesthetic reality. And given what we now know about what determines invasiveness, he likely had little clue what would “behave” in the new environment.

For many invasive species problems, hyperbole is simply not possible. Strawberry guava in Hawaii, Brazilian pepper in the Everglades, kudzu, Phragmites, melastomes in the tropical Pacific, water hyacinth… these plants and many others, as invasives, have the capacity to quickly and radically alter environments that are otherwise largely unthreatened. Invasive species are arguably the only destructive threat that truly protected areas face in today’s climate conditions.

I’m an academic who’s worked on invasive species in the past, and while we’ve spent a lot of time teasing apart the mechanisms that promote invasiveness, and still have a lot to learn, the immediate impact such species have can be evident to anybody simply by walking around affected vs. unaffected areas. “Green” does not always equal “good”.

By: doug l

doug l — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:40:33 +0000

Loved this mornings NYT article. It brought to mind something I’d read about the noted naturalist Loren Eisley who would, as he travelled around the world, often intentionally carry seeds from past locations for the expressed purpose of surreptitously introducing them as exotics when he felt it might add to the diversity of a place..or just “fit in”, “part of the process” and all that.
It’s always refreshing to read arguments counter to the wild hyperoble typical to the news media that feeds the alarmed, though only partially informed, reaction. Of course the alarmed reader/viewer is someone who’s likely buying newspapers or watching TV thus adding to the wealth of the publisher or broadcaster and encouraging them to do more of that kind of stuff.
I sure look forward to the day when we see the same kind of treatment to counter some of the wildest worst case scenarios described regarding our planet’s environment and its ability to withstand climatic shifts due to the principles of dynamic equilibrium, a concept evidently too turgid for the passionately involved.
Now, as for asteroid or cometary impact…there’s something we can rightfully worry about, and in my opinion, something we ought to soon. Cheers.