RE: The carp are coming! (And is that really such a bad thing?) by Greg Breining
Dear Greg:
You are correct about how little we really understand exotic species and their place in ecosystems, but it is your propaganda that provides evidence the loudest. We are and will be finding out just how disastrous they will turn out to be and I don’t think we’ll find a lot of exceptions. Washed up is not how I would describe their arrival. If that is your poetry, please keep it to yourself.
Few of the species I am concerned about washed up on our shores. While many were careless accidents, many others were netted and dug, crated, fork-lifted, loaded, shipped and/or flown to be bought and sold in the market place and then dumped into prime habitats.
#1. We do not describe exotic species with the same language we do immigrants who, unlike exotic species, typically give back more than they take. But you are correct that it is warfare over food and the losers are quantified in diversity lost and species extinct. There are generally no policies based on science conducting this war.
#2. Continents can suffer massive widespread extinctions, it just takes longer. Islands are like saplings that you run over with a bobcat and it’s done with. Continents are like a century old oak that you damage with construction this year and it gives up the ghost ten years later. If Michigan where an island, their EAB problems would soon be over.
No, local ecosystems are not richer in diversity from the addition of foreign species. Overwhelmingly, all of the many local ecosystems I have wandered across all the years I have lived here in Minnesota are moderately to severely degraded from the invasion of non-native plants. Even the rarest of places no longer remain un-touched.
I have personally witnessed thousands of small white lady’s-slippers, Cypripedium candidum and other orchid species including our state flower, Cypripedium reginae growing among them down in the Minnesota River Valley in Bloomington, wiped out of existence from just a half handful of non-native species, primarily reed canary grass (RCG), Phalaris arundinacea.
Not only are the non-native species of far fewer number than the abundant native flora they replaced they are also generally of poor character. If you are talking about people’s little back yard gardens, it is true they can be a diverse source of non-native genotypes but even they lack in diversity from what was on the land before the gardener dug it up. One of the biggest things they are missing is insects. Any responsible gardener would read Doug Tallamy’s “Bringing Nature Home – How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens,” before putting another shovel into the ground. Diversity on a global scale is far more important than people’s back yards.
#3. It is only with exception that you cannot tell a native from a non-native as we see here in Minnesota right now with RCG but you sure can tell its destructive behavior. Botanists don’t know everything and not all natives are well studied or understood. But that natives may change behavior in response to environmental changes, especially something like climate change, is to be expected as diverse ecosystems are dynamic for just that purpose. Non-natives do not or cannot behave in this fashion in their new environments.
I have not walked through the Bay Area’s abandoned groves of Australian eucalyptus but I have walked into endless melaleuca, Melaleuca quinquenervia, stands in Florida and if you are seeing much diversity in there you are smoking something. I hear rumors that more and more Burmese pythons, Python molurus bivittatus, have been showing up lately…yippee!
You are correct that there is no such thing as a good or bad ecosystem but in that regard there is no such thing as a good or bad economy – just different economies. But even the poorest economist can recognize a rich, diverse and thriving economy from an impoverished one. Ecosystem or economy, should we not know which we would have and strive for it? Healthy ecosystems are rich, diverse, resilient and stingy. They know how to capture energy and conserve it by sharing it with all. Non-natives share nothing.
#4. This is the most obfuscative preposition I’ve heard lately, you out do yourself. Exotic species are unequivocally hard to control because too often they are out of control or politically protected. As for the heroic zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha, I don’t know of a single environmentalist that would argue that crystal clear water is the end of all goals. What happens to the sharp-shinned hawk, Accipiter striatus, that would have eaten the common yellowthroat, Geothlypis trichas, that would have eaten the emerald spreadwing, Lestes dryas, that would have eaten the midge, Stenochironomus macateei, larvae that would have eaten the plankton algae, Anabaena spp. that zebra mussel, D. polymorpha, got to first?
#5. I don’t like that the world is increasingly made up of a hodge-podge stew of bewildered species collected from all over the globe with just a few dwindling pockets of desperate hold outs that have somehow managed to stay under the radar screen so far. For sure something or someone is hunting them down to destroy them as we speak. I do want and love nature and what you are proposing is miserable.
When is the last time you looked for any wildflowers in a buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica and Frangula alnifolia, forest – if that even is what it can be called? Between them, exotic earthworms, Lumbricus terrestris (among more than 60 other non-native worms introduced to North America) and garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, there is nothing left! Thanks much in part to gardeners we now have our first non-native orchid species helleborine, Epipactis helleborine invading the hills of Winona county. We already had some 44 native orchid species in Minnesota, (the only state with an orchid for a state flower) – wasn’t that enough? Most of them didn’t even bother to figure out what we already had before they were off looking for something new and they found a poor excuse for what they were replacing.
You are correct that Asian carp, Aristichthys nobilis and Hypophthalmichthys molitrix are winning and will end up being the largest single biomass in many of our water ways just as round goby, Neogobius melanostomus now makes up most of the biomass at the bottom of Lake Erie. You are also correct that the time to stop them is before we import them. You talk about “wreaking tremendous change” but as we’ve learned, earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes and meteor strikes also wreak tremendous change – should we then embrace them?
I say; Mille Lacs Lake for Minnesota walleye, Stizostedion vitreum and coniferous bogs for Minnesota orchids!
I am not stupid, of course we will continue to move life forms around the planet, as that is our nature, but must we insist on continuing to do so, so mindlessly? I find my nature to be anything but mindless.
Will people be willing? I find too many people unwilling or incapable of changing just about anything, dangerous or not. Something can be done about many of our invasive plant species but too few people have chosen to do so. We have been effective against many weeds in the past. I still have a copy of the 1925 – State of Minnesota, State Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 43 – Weeds in the Fields, Gardens, and Lawns, as well as the accompanying “Noxious Weeds” colored flyer with The Minnesota Plan for Cooperative Weed Control and Eradication flow-chart on the back. While that program is trashed today, they had most of it all figured out back then.
I also know we do have improved knowledge, understanding and better management tools to fight these problems today. We also have many good people, both in and out of government with skills, knowledge and no small amount of passion who but languish for so much to get done and nothing to do. They have no leadership with vision right now.
A change we can believe in? The person that manages to outlaw the stupid penny will get my next vote for president.
For those who would still insist on gardening with Asian wildflowers and fishing for Asian fish I might suggest they purchase a one way ticket to China and think about staying there.
For you, Homo sapien, I would suggest a one week’s vacation on a treeless (some previous tourist released some damned insect that ate them all) tropical island with a Bengal tiger, Panthera tigris bengalensis, and just six days worth of food – live young wild pigs, Sus scrofa, between the two of you. We will see who goes extinct first.
You are correct that it will take a lot of convincing or if not, LTL
Regards,
Peter M. Dziuk
Minnesota Wildflowers
Columbia Heights, MN
p.s. Doug Tallamy will be speaking at the Wild Ones Spring Conference 2010, 27 February – Radisson Hotel, Roseville
