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Why Alien Species Thrive

planux writes "The Sacramento Bee has an interesting article about why invasive animal species thrive, pushing out native species -- sometimes to the point of extinction. Kevin Lafferty, a U.S. Geological Survey marine ecologist at the Western Ecological Research Center in Santa Barbara says "Invasive species end up with about half the parasites, or diseases, they had at home." Animals with an average of 16 parasites on their home turf typically bring about three of the parasites with them to new locations. And only about four new parasites will typically adapt to attack the invading species. Net gain: 9 fewer parasites!"

4 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Parasites... by Sunlighter · · Score: 3, Funny

    Makes sense. That's why the colonists came to America. Damned European parasites.

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    Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
    1. Re:Parasites... by Sunlighter · · Score: 2, Funny

      Good point, but I was referring to human parasites like tax collectors and religious persecutors.

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      Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
  2. I have seen this happen first hand. by Neck_of_the_Woods · · Score: 4, Funny


    On my native network where the domiant boxen is Windows, I have found that non-indiginous boxen such as Solaris, Linux, and Mac are slowly taking over one part of my network. They often don't fall victum to the numerous virus and dipshit users. Either by design or just from complexity built into thier mutated form. I have also noticed a cross pollonation that has caused a raise in stability in our fringe windows boxes that are protected by the Alien unix and linux boxen.

    It is all just nature at work, I one day hope to see all my boxeb being some kind of freakish hybrid of windows and unix/linux....or maybe the dominate boxen will take over the whole network.

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    Neck_of_the_Woods
    #/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
  3. But.. by ApharmdB · · Score: 2, Funny

    The problems caused by invasive species are not due to the natural migration or spreading of species. They are caused when humans start shipping stuff all over the world. For example, there was that Chinese lung-fish that some dope in Delaware threw in to a pond roughly a year ago because he didn't want it as a pet anymore.

    If you consider all of this to still be part of Darwinism, then you can look at it from another perspective. People want to protect the environment for their own sakes. For example, they like the varied swamp plants that they have in the Northeast US and hate seeing them all wiped out and replaced with a single invasive plant, a la purple loosestrife.