Unintended Consequences Removing a Foreign Species

[archman]

Yeah, and so is the white man!

I will be quite put out if Fish & Wildlife deports me back to Europe.

 

[raviepoo]

Zebra mussels have somewhat cleared up viz in the great lakes and St-Lawrence river tough.

Have other foreign species had any positive impact?

Better visibility is great for scuba divers but not so great for the flora and fauna of the infested body of water. Zebra Mussels can set in place a chain of events that leaves a lake or river inhospitable to other forms of life. THey can smother native mussell species. THey are filter feeders who filter all the food itmes out of the water, leaving it clear (great vis!) but depleted of nutrients. They feast and the rest of the food chain starves.

I wouldn't call their impact positive.

 

[raviepoo]

I will be quite put out if Fish & Wildlife deports me back to Europe.

Meh! Not me. Europe is so much more civilized.

 

[Belmont]

Better visibility is great for scuba divers but not so great for the flora and fauna of the infested body of water. Zebra Mussels can set in place a chain of events that leaves a lake or river inhospitable to other forms of life. THey can smother native mussell species. THey are filter feeders who filter all the food itmes out of the water, leaving it clear (great vis!) but depleted of nutrients. They feast and the rest of the food chain starves.

I wouldn't call their impact positive.

It depends on ones point of vue, even if limited.

 

[drbill]

That's too bad Bill. I wish there was a way to remove it. My hope is the native kelp will still grow stong and maybe shade-kill the sargassum.

Dave

I had hoped the same. However the giant kelp is doing fairly well given the summer temperatures and here is an image that shows how dense the immature stages of this pernicious weedy alga are at the Empire Landing Quarry. It is once again dominating much of the rocky reef.

 

[drbill]

Meh! Not me. Europe is so much more civilized.

Eeeeuuuuuwww, you xenophile!

 

[The Chairman]

People sure like the idea of wild horse herds running about, too. We commonly forget that they're an introduced species to the United States.

Uh, re-introduced that is. The fossil record shows that horses, albeit a smaller version, were prolific at least here in Florida. We also had mastadons, camels, sloths and dugong among others.

It was interesting when I got to stop at Fossil Butte up in Idaho a few days ago. There was a shad looking fish called a statia that were plentiful as fossils there but now are nowhere to be found. They really reminded me of the threadfin shad that are so common here in Florida. I also saw sunfish fossils there as well as a LARGE Caiman. It seems the only constant we enjoy is change!

 

[drbill]

Many biologists have used the term "non-native" to refer to a species which has been transported to a place outside its normal range due to human activity. This would also apply to members of a species (like the South American tree tobacco introduced to SoCal) which were initially transported out of their original range (South America) by human activity, then dispersed "naturally" (airborn seed) to other locations (from mainland SoCal to Catalina in a massive fire in the early 1900's).

Looking at the human species, MeiLing refers to an interesting question. How can one refer to the "Native" Americans of North America or the Polynesians of the Pacific as more "native" than the Europeans and other cultures who settled in the Americas or the Pacific at later dates? Both "dispersed" themselves by human means (of course!). The only difference is the time they did so.

The human species has dispersed out of its regions of origin to pretty well cover the entire world. Pulses of migration have occurred at different times in history, but does that make them qualitatively different?

I think the one distinction that disturbs me is that these later cultures, generally technologically more advanced, often used their technology to defeat or subdue the previous occupants. We see that in separate waves of "Native" American cultures into SoCal over the past 40,000 years as well as the waves of Spanish Europeans and "Americans" (East Coasters) in later years.

 

[raviepoo]

Eeeeuuuuuwww, you xenophile!

Laughing my internationalist ***** off at that!

 

[archman]

Uh, re-introduced that is. The fossil record shows that horses, albeit a smaller version, were prolific at least here in Florida. We also had mastadons, camels, sloths and dugong among others.

Yeah, but those were different species from the exotics. And in the case of the extinct fossil species, they were native.