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New Zealand Exterminates Rats
-brazil- writes "It's well-known that one of the worst things humans can do to a biosystem is to introduce new plants and animals that the native species are unprepared to compete with. The NZ government has been trying to reverse one such such ecological disaster in a project to exterminate rats from Campbell Island, where they were introduced by sailors 200 years ago, spread like wildfire and proceeded to severely decimate or outright eradicate many species of native seabirds. After massive deployment of rat poison two years ago, the island has now been declared a rat-free bird sanctuary, and some species that only survived in captivity will be re-introduced. Still, full recovery is estimated to take hundreds of years."
On another note, though, one of the most interesting species battles that i have ever seen was the fight between blackberry brambles and mint which took place outside a house that i lived in once. Mint is an incredibly hardy plant once you get a good crop of it. The thorns eventually won- the only thing that i've ever seen resist that mint horde. The mint even choked out the poison ivy, the grass, the dandelions, and everything else that crossed its path... but the blackberries won.
Somehow, the rat story makes me feel sorry that the dodo is entirely extinct, and makes me aware of the dwindling wildlife habitats... time to take me to the ecology fund and donate somebody else's money to save rainforests. It's not offtopic, just an addendum.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
1.) these are not natural changes, they are human induced.
Humans are somehow not part of nature? What we do doesn't count as being "natural"? Yes, we may be more "aware" of the world around us, but that doesn't make us any less a part of nature - if anything, it makes us more a part of it.
If you were coming from a religious perspective, where God says that the plants and animals exist for humans to exploit, I might just let you get away with that attitude, but I am suspicious that that is not your angle.
When a beaver builds a damn, it radically alters its envionment. Does that mean beaver-built damns are unnatural and bad? Is sentience really what separates environment alteration from being "good" vs. "bad"?
And plants and animals can and do make their way to new places on their own (how did all those plants and animals get to Hawaii before the first humans did, given that the islands are thousands of miles from the nearest body of land?). Often it is an animal who is the agent for change - seeds get stuck on a bird's feathers (or fail to get digested upon being eaten) and drop off hundreds of miles away. If it happens "naturally" it is ok, but if humans (who are apparently not "natural") do it, it isn't? What's the difference between a migrating bird relocating something 500 miles away, and a human doing it?
Government IS the problem.
That is not entirely true. Horses have not taken over ecosystems and multiplied like wildfire and killed other species in the US. If anything, they probably refill the role of grazing that was lost when buffalo were all but eradicated. Cute and furry animals do get killed all the time- a good example would be kangaroos in Australia, where they apparently just run excessively rampant and the gov't takes steps to control the populations. That does not hold much water I know due to the fact that they are afaik indigenous to the region. I am not an expert on this stuff, so I cant really comment on what furry little animals have moved into ecosystems and destroyed them while humans looked the other way. But I do think you are off base on this. If cute furry litte beavers were taking over lakes in florida, killing off other species, I am pretty sure the EPA would do something.
Depends on what they used as a poison. The interesting thing about places like Australia and New Zealand is that we have lots of plants that have naturally occurring toxins to which native animals are immune.
For example; In Western Australia, a large number of plants produce a substance called 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) in their leaves, berries, etc. Native animals, after millenia of exposure to this toxin, are immune to its effects - they munch away on it happily.
However - if you feed 1080 to a cat/fox/other introduced feral mammal, they drop dead real fast. As a result, 1080 is used extensively in feral animal control programs throughout Australia and New Zealand.
1080 is naturally occurring, biodegradable and therefore non-accumulative, so it has minimal long term effect on the native environment, other than the irradication of introduced animals and a restoration of the native population.
If you want more info, there is a really good (PDF) document from the Western Australian Agriculture department here.
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
yes, of course humans are "natural", although a lot of what humans do could be easily viewed as being unnatural. or perhaps more accurately, in opposition to.
much of what humans do is akin to the actions of various other animals, such as the beaver or the bird in your example. the problem is the scale of the changes. a beaver builds a small dam that backs up a stream that creates a bit of a lake where there was none before, thus altering the flow of the stream and changing the character of the river ecosystem. now how does that compare to a 700 foot concrete dam that floods several hundred miles of canyon thus completely eliminating the ecosystem that had developed there before? (see glen canyon and grand canyon, az, us).
through the development of our technology we have become something of a natural force in our own right. humans possess the ability to dramatically and suddenly change ecosystems that previously was possessed only by asteroids, hurricanes, volcanoes, and other extreme natural phenomenon. only we employ that capability much more frequently and efficiently.
and on top of that, we are still running around acting like a bunch of caveman. it's time we grew up.
obligatory cheesy quote - "with great power comes great responsibility..."
fuck you.
Two examples in the US that I know of are domestic rabbits and cats. I heard a bit on NPR a while back about some quiet little suburb that was being overrun by escaped domestic rabbits. They were destroying gardens and flower beds (no, this isn't as severe as disturbing natural species, I admit). The people weren't allowed to destroy the things, and they were getting pretty irked.
If you search on plastic.com, you'll see a headline about how environmental groups (more specifically, bird-lovers) are on the anti-cat campaign trail. I can totally understand their point of view, as the little beasties are pretty evil and run unchecked in most every community.
Method of processing duck feet
Zebra mussels continue their takeover of Lake Champlain. AFAIK, there is no effective remedy, even if you're willing to dump nasty stuff into the lake.
As for dodos, I heard an interesting story once upon a time - don't know if it's really true. There's a tree on the island where the dodos lived, and it's seeds had a really thick coat. The dodos ate the fruit, and the seeds passed, essentially untouched. The dodos would eat the seeds, again... and again... After something like a half-dozen passes through the dodo, the seed coat had been weakened enough that the seed could germinate.
Apparently the dodo was unique in this relationship with the seed. The youngest tree of this type dates back to the extinction of the dodo. Two for the price of one.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The more I find out about the Romans, the more they sound like a bunch of evil, twisted bastards.
Stick Men