Invasive Species Cost Humans $423 Billion Each Year and Threaten World's Diversity (theguardian.com) 57
Invasive species are costing the world at least $423bn every year and have become a leading threat to the diversity of life on Earth, according to a UN assessment. From a news report: From invasive mice that eat seabird chicks in their nests to non-native grasses that helped fuel and intensify last month's deadly fires in Hawaii, at least 3,500 harmful invasive species have been recorded globally in every region, spread by human travel and trade. Their impact is destructive for humans and wildlife, sometimes causing extinctions and permanently damaging the healthy functioning of an ecosystem.
Leading scientists say the threat posed by invasive species is under appreciated, underestimated and sometimes unacknowledged, with more than 37,000 alien species now known to be introduced around the world and about 200 establishing themselves each year. While not all will become invasive, experts say there are significant tools to mitigate their spread and impact, protecting and restoring ecosystems in the process.
"Invasive alien species are a major threat to biodiversity and can cause irreversible damage to nature, including local and global species extinctions, and also threaten human wellbeing," wrote Prof Helen Roy, Prof Anibal Pauchard and Prof Peter Stoett, who led the research. "It would be an extremely costly mistake to regard biological invasions only as someone else's problem," said Pauchard. "Although the specific species that inflict damage vary from place to place, these are risks and challenges with global roots but very local impacts facing people in every country, from all backgrounds and in every community -- even Antarctica is being affected."
Leading scientists say the threat posed by invasive species is under appreciated, underestimated and sometimes unacknowledged, with more than 37,000 alien species now known to be introduced around the world and about 200 establishing themselves each year. While not all will become invasive, experts say there are significant tools to mitigate their spread and impact, protecting and restoring ecosystems in the process.
"Invasive alien species are a major threat to biodiversity and can cause irreversible damage to nature, including local and global species extinctions, and also threaten human wellbeing," wrote Prof Helen Roy, Prof Anibal Pauchard and Prof Peter Stoett, who led the research. "It would be an extremely costly mistake to regard biological invasions only as someone else's problem," said Pauchard. "Although the specific species that inflict damage vary from place to place, these are risks and challenges with global roots but very local impacts facing people in every country, from all backgrounds and in every community -- even Antarctica is being affected."
they got it backwards (Score:2, Insightful)
The number one most destructive and resiliant species? Homo Sapiens.
All the other species are just trying to survive the worldwide spread of said species.
Re: they got it backwards (Score:4, Insightful)
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I somehow suspect that both you and the original poster are humans, belonging to the same species as the aforementioned "invasive species". Yes, humans have drastically changed the environment and have driven some species to extinction. However, it is our species that have developed certain level of intelligence and technology. We are the only chance that the life on this planet has to survive our Sun becoming a red giant. That will inevitably happen one fine day. Renewables will sterilize the planet.
I beli
Correct, but not complete. (Score:2, Insightful)
The number one most destructive and resiliant species? Homo Sapiens.
All the other species are just trying to survive the worldwide spread of said species.
That statement is correct, but incomplete.
The number one species with the best chance of fixing the problem is: Homo Sapiens.
Much of the invasive species damage was caused at a time when humanity wasn't fully cognizant of the problems. For example, the anopheles mosquito is not native to North America, and came over somehow with the early settlers.
You might claim that "as a species" we were too young to appreciate our place in the world, but that's no longer true. We were the destructive species in our youn
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Not all humans screwed things up. Native Americans managed the entire continent sustainably and very well for thousands of years before European "settlers" arrived. Those were the same "settlers" that wiped out many species of animals as they ate their way across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. The number of species lost is unknown because people mostly were interested in how they tasted, and if you read old ship logs, that becomes very apparent.
Trying to tix things with technology, including genet
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You need to read more about Native American stewardship of the land, since you are obviously reading the wrong sources. And you missed my point. Native Americans revered the land and the flora and fauna in the various ecosystems. They did not leave nature alone, but they managed it wisely. They used localized burns to create more grazing area for bison, and they managed the fish populations well without overfishing. In a nutshell, they melded with the ecosystems in ways that often benefited both.
The point y
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There's some contentious debate around that notion. Some scholars believe that the bison was on its way to extinction but the diseases introduced by early Europeans killed so much of the indigenous populations that the bison herds recovered.
Never heard of this and a quick search didn't turn up anything.
And it doesn't really make sense to me either, natives lived with the Bison for thousands of years, but then suddenly right before the Europeans showed up they almost hunted them to extinction?
Native Americans or other indigenous groups in various places aren't any less human and the notion of the "noble savage" isn't something that exists outside of popular imagination.
Noble savage is more to do with a belief that the "primitive" person is uncorrupted by technology and society, and therefore devoid of "modern" vices like greed and dishonesty. There's a racist undertone to that since it assumes they're too simple to be ev
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Yeah, "cost" indeed... (Score:2)
What have we cost every other species on the planet by ignoring and forcing them to our beck and call?
I assume this is just like how "piracy costs us all", right? Yes, I would steal an apple. Especially if they kept their apple too.
"Money to undo the effect of..." is not "costs".
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The very phrase "invasive species" is deeply dishonest and evasive. What is an "invasive species"? One from a different place; one that doesn't belong.
How do invasive species get to their destinations? Humans. They come on ships, planes, and other forms of transport.
Re: they got it backwards (Score:2)
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The number one most destructive and resiliant species? Homo Sapiens. All the other species are just trying to survive the worldwide spread of said species.
You mean the living organism that is Earth, is reacting to the cancer that is humans.
We have created antibiotics to fight infection. The response to that in nature, has been to fight back with antimicrobial resistant strains. Some even argue that fungi will eventually invade our species (The Last of Us), with just a few more ticks on the temperature gauge.
Life is about balance. Disrupt that balance, and Mother Nature will fuck you accordingly. The planet was here long before us, and can certainly adapt t
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There is no "mother nature". Evolution is just random stuff being thrown against the wall and seeing what sticks. Humans are basically just mixing around the petri dish that is the planet and evolution is doing its thing - species are adapting to new locales that they have been introduced to. Sometimes (often times) that's at the expense of what was there before. Sometimes its destructive, but there is no "norm" that some mystical ju-ju (eg "Mother Earth") tries to re-establish. Life will just keep mar
Re: they got it backwards (Score:1)
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We certainly have been shirking our responsibility to the Earth. Not only are people seemingly ignorant of the concept of environmental stewardship, they are actively hostile to the idea that we collectively have a duty to clean up our own shit.
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Ever noticed how birds often take a dump right before they fly? It's an adaptation...they don't carry useless weight. So it's not impossible, but seeds don't often travel long distances in a bird's belly. If the odd one does, it's not like multiple shiploads of various seed-carrying stuff that then gets transported all over the continent into a wide variety of habitats.
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Suppose two sparrows gripped the coconut by the husk...
*ahem*
Are we not considering things being carried along on ocean currents?
Most of the remote islands that were not part of a prior land bridge were populated by plants and terrestrial animals in that manner
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African or European sparrows?
Actually, that's a somewhat different situation. Stuff carried by ocean currents usually winds up on a shore. Just from a pure size perspective, with all the implications for widely varied ecosystems, islands are very different from continent wide distribution provided by our various transportation networks.
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Sadly for the joke, European and African Sparrows are the same species, the Old-World Sparrow [wikipedia.org] with the speciation being between them and the New-World Sparrows [wikipedia.org]
Sometimes geography has separated members of the some species for long enough to become separate species, and other times a completely different species can evolve/mutate to fit an available ecological niche. I think that old and new world sparrows are thought to branch apart from the order Passeriformes
Continents have been joined repeatedly though hi
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Sadly for the joke, European and African Sparrows are the same species, the Old-World Sparrow
That only makes the joke better.
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For the sake of the joke, reality must submit to humour.
And yes, you've put your finger on the difference...scale. When you add in the way our incredibly efficient transportation networks provide access to ecologies that had been fairly insulated from invasive species, we find that the game has changed. Additionally, we've repeatedly imported and assisted invasives on purpose, then regretted it. Eucalyptus trees imported into California for ornamental landscaping are a good example. They've spread far b
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Ever noticed how birds often take a dump right before they fly?
With that kind of opener, I'm guessing you're a part-time ice breaker at parties.
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The same people who get to decide what the right average global temperature is.
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I think the right temperature is the one that allows us to produce a maximum amount of food and suffer a minimal amount of weather related infrastructure damage.
So probably whatever was typical in the mid-20th century was the sweet spot. Change is bad when it costs money and needlessly wastes human lives.
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There are technical definitions of "inv
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I recall in Oakland, CA a few decades ago, the attempt to cull invasive trees was decried as "tree racism."
R.A.I.D. (Score:2)
There is only one way out of it. R.A.I.D.
No more bugs. No more problems.
--
No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. - J. P. Morgan
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I say we take off and nuke it from orbit.
It’s the only way to make sure
Atlantic blue crabs in Italy (Score:1)
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Eat the problem.
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That is one solution, but at the same moment, governments often put weird taxes, quotas and other rules on fishing and seafood as well. There is actually a huge market for EATING invasive species, but fishermen are often in the same boat (pun intended) as the non-invasive species both in the mediterranean as well as in the coastal regions of the US and Canada.
I have a local seafood place that sources European green crabs for example, which are delicious, but European green crabs are classified as banned in
Re:Atlantic blue crabs in Italy (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently, that has been taken to heart [marinesanctuary.org]
While trapping lionfish is helping remove an added threat to the reefs, they aren’t just throw out or wasted once caught. After being collected, the fish are sold to restaurants and markets as a sustainable seafood source. Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary Foundation hosts an event called “A Fishy Affair: Malicious But Delicious” where experienced chefs prepare their own unique lionfish dishes. The event, held every September, is designed to bring awareness to the issue of lionfish on Gray’s Reef and educate the public about invasive species, national marine sanctuaries, ocean conservation, and sustainable seafood.
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Nobody in the Great Lakes is rushing to eat all the lampreys.
We have tried ... (Score:2)
The problem with stopping it (Score:3)
Think of an invasive species as an advanced bioweapon - it can self-replicate and whatever it destroys is raw material for that process.
Once one has a beachhead, it is extremely unlikely there is any practical option for stopping it. It's always regenerating and spreading.
It happens without human assistance too, and biomes evolve. The problem is that when we get involved, the rate of change is far more likely to exceed the ability of an ecosystem to adapt and cause a collapse.
Humans are an invasive species. (Score:2, Insightful)
Counter-intuitive (Score:1)
It's odd how they are more competitive than native species. That's counter-intuitive. One reason is that local predators haven't adopted to eat it quickly yet. I imagine after several hundred years, the native species' local advantages would give them the edge again, assuming they survive.
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It turns out that being adequately adapted against your local competitors is enough to create a dynamic equilibrium... the prey and predators tend to evolve into a balance, and because they're 'good enough' there is no strong selection pressure for 'better'.
When an invasive species arrives and dominates, it is because it evolved in a different ecosystem and happens to have an advantage that goes beyond that local local maxima. (And yes, I did mean to type 'local' twice).
I haven't looked into it, but it seem
How many boxes are being threatened? (Score:2)
Of the many boxes of liberty/freedom, they are all under threat. The ammo box to be sure regardless of SCOTUS rulings. The soap box? Yup, especially in the light of cancel culture and social media suppression. The ballot box? Regardless of where you stand on the outcome of recent elections, you believe it's at risk (or you're not paying attention). The jury box? Yeah, particularly when radical judges and the system that demands you be tried in a specific location deny you the right to a trial by ones pee
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you don't understand that the isolation from society is a design feature of the cult,
Like how the anti-WTO protesters fight against global cooperation whenever members of that trade group get together to reduce isolationism? Or is the meeting of people wearing suits a sufficient Pavlovian stimulus to get them to throw rocks through Starbucks windows?
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You do realize that the Seattle anti-WTO protests were in 1999...
They have really dropped the ball, but in the interim we had the TeaParty(TM) and MAGATS(TM), which are large and effective astro-turfing campaigns
how do you define "natural" then? (Score:1)
Nearly every species could be considered "invasive" at some point. It spreads into an adjacent ecosystem, there's a span of adjustment, and it either thrives or dies.
Earthworms are technically an invasive species in the US.
That IS the natural process. Humans have just offered novel and accelerated vectors.
So basically we have here some humans insisting that "the way nature is now" (or 50 years ago, or 500 years ago) is "the one worth protecting" and we have to somehow strive to lock everything into that s
Costing the world? (Score:2)
Where can I deduct my share of that $423 billion on my income tax return?
That's half of one percent of the world's GDP (Score:2)
A multiple of that gets eaten by pests alone.
You sure that's all? (Score:2)