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!"

Comments

Parasites...

[Sunlighter]

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

I have seen this happen first hand.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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.