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Alabama Wages War Against the Perfect Weed
pickens writes "Dan Berry writes in the NY Times that the State of Alabama is spending millions of dollars in federal stimulus money to combat Cogongrass, a.k.a. the perfect weed, the killer weed, and the weed from another continent. A weed that 'evokes those old science-fiction movies in which clueless citizens ignore reports of an alien invasion.' Cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica) is considered one of the 10 worst weeds in the world. 'It can take over fields and forests, ruining crops, destroying native plants, upsetting the ecosystem,' writes Berry. 'It is very difficult to kill. It burns extremely hot. And its serrated leaves and grainy composition mean that animals with even the most indiscriminate palates — goats, for example — say no thanks.' Alabama's overall strategy is to draw a line across the state at Highway 80 and eradicate everything north of it; then, in phases, to try to control it to the south. But the weed is so resilient that you can't kill it with one application of herbicide, you have to return several months later and do it again. 'People think this is just a grass,' says forester Stephen Pecot. 'They don't understand that cogongrass can replace an entire ecosystem.' Left unchecked, Pecot says 'it could spread all the way to Michigan.'"
Here in British Columbia we don't wage war on it, it's our #1 export.
Nice.
I'll have to plant some of that inbetween the patches of kudzu.
Now I only need a face-eater and I'll finally have a respectable death-world themed garden.
I had an entirely different thing in mind when I read "the perfect weed".
If it is that resilient and fast growing, you will not be able to control it anyhow. Many, many examples of invasive species throughout the world show this. So, just learn how to harvest it and make biodiesel/biogas/electricity out of it. No intensive agriculture, ferilizers or herbicides needed. Plus, this might piss off the corn/ethanol lobby enough to actually start taking action against the grass. Ether way, we win. Oh yeah, biodiversity losses, but that is shafted anyway...
Complexity is a measure of our ignorance...
Having seen goats chewing happily on pieces of clothing and other garbage, mutating goats to have no sense of taste sounds to me like mutating rabbits to have long ears. (I was planning to write something slightly different but less suited for small children and Americans here.)
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
We have the same problem in the UK with Japanese Knot Weed. Nothing eats it, it can respawn from the smallest cutting. So you can't burn it, you can't throw it away, you can only poison it. And each stem has to be done individually, and the process needs to be repeated two or three times to kill the bloody thing. They're talking about introducing some japanese insects that feed on it, but then what's to say they wont prefer strawberries or wheat or something else?
It's like mutating your usual Ford and GM SUV to have more low-fuel indicator lights.
This sounds a lot like Kudzu - another plant brought over from Japan.
From TFA "For a while, government officials encouraged the use of cogongrass as a forage crop and as a way to stem soil erosion."
We did that with Kudzu too. What's with these agricultural guys promoting alien species they clearly know nothing about ?
Although, if nothing wants to eat it, why promote it as a forage crop ? That does suggest that some animal must like it. There must be some reason why the South of Japan is not one mass of Kudzu and cogongrass.
Thank god something living is willing to move back into Michigan. There is hope to save this state!
Aren't we supposed to all be about green energy these days? Pay someone to collect it. Shred and compress it into fuel pellets. Burn it to make heat or electricity.
There are a number of hints that say that we're dealing with a great energy-crop:
1. It burns extremely hot (yay)
2. It grows fast (good)
3. It certainly won't require herbicides (meaning it's "biological").
We just need some biologists to turn this stuff into fuel (ethanol)... alternatively, it can be pelletized.
I think they're barking up the wrong tree; controlling the weed seems like an expensive pasttime. Instead, I'd combat it genetically: - start building up cultures of the weed, test the characteristics of different strains (go for ones that are more susceptible to infections, aphids, lower burn temperatures, less serrated edges, etc), breed these together, and create a weaker strain; distribute that across infested regions to weaken the weed.
Surely natural selection would just mean that the weaker versions of the weed would be selected against and so their genes would be eliminated from the gene pool again, leaving just the toughest varieties?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I'm ahead of you there. A couple of years ago, I photoshopped the words "OH HAI" on a picture of a kitten, and now we're already seeing the results of my work.. the complete destruction of the entire English language is already nigh.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
It's OK. It is obvious that you are a product of the public school system.
--
its a simpsons reference when new lizards are introduced
From Wikipedia:
Since the town considered the pigeons to be a nuisance, they are delighted with the fact that the lizards have eaten all the pigeons. As a result, Bart is thanked and honored by Mayor Quimby with a loganberry scented candle. Lisa worries that the town will now become infested by lizards rather than the pigeons, but Skinner assures her that they will send in Chinese Needle Snakes, then snake-eating gorillas, and then "winter will take care of the rest."
"... the State of Alabama is spending millions of dollars in federal stimulus money to combat Congress, a.k.a. the perfect weed, the killer weed, and the weed from another continent. A weed that 'evokes those old science-fiction movies in which clueless citizens ignore reports of an alien invasion.'
Congress (Imperialista corruptivus) is considered one of the 10 worst weeds in the world. 'It can take over farms and factories, ruining cops, destroying Native Americans, upsetting the economic system,' writes Berry. 'It is very difficult to kill.' But the weed is so resilient that you can't kill it with one election, you have to return two years later and do it again. Left unchecked, Pecot says 'it could spread all the way to Europe.'"
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
We've got to figure out how to turn this stuff into biodiesel.
And while were at it, let's rename this weed to Tiberium.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm not sure what this "balance" thing is that people keep on talking about. It's as if they believe that ecosystems without humans are in some kind of stable equilibrium, which is bizarre and counter-factual. Not only do new species show up now and then without human intervention, environmental conditions change, and species-interactions occur, that prevent anything remotely resembling stability beyond the very basic level required for the moderately long-term persistance of life.
And it seems that you believe that because absolute statism is impossible, all changes are equal.
No there's no such thing as "balance" as some kind of permanent thing. Yes ecosystems change without human intervention. But when stated as such absolutes, these statements are essentially meaningless. You are quite deliberately not drawing a distinction between the mountains eventually eroding, and them being bulldozed into the ocean in a week.
If you don't take a literal absolutist definition of "balance" as "statism", then it's obvious that there is a balance in our ecosystems. Yes they change, borders between ecosystems move, species adapt, yet these things all happen together, maintaining over time a balance despite change. Because they aren't mutually exclusive opposites in the real world of shades of gray. The whole reason why these introduced plants are a problem is because they didn't evolve here. Thus their impact in this ecosystem clearly differs from that of any organism that did evolve here, or with their impact in the ecosystem they did evolve in.
That is the kind of balance we're talking about. Not an absolutist balance, but the natural kind where species co-evolve. No you can't maintain anything like this over the long term in the face of ice ages and other geologic/climate changes, no you can't prevent any species from ever being introduced to an environment where it did not evolve and has a disruptive effect, but that's fine, nobody is saying we must. But there's a reason the last major extinction event occurred after humans arrived, with millennia of relative stability before even in the face of advancing or retreating glaciers.
So just because change is inevitable, that does not mean we humans should not try, nor be concerned with, avoiding being the instrument of rapid and destructive change. That's a foolish, irresponsible view which is what absolutism always is.
If you value ecosystemic "balance" then you should be rooting for the weed (as it were) because the sooner humans stop interfering with its spread the sooner a new quasi-equilibrium will be established.
Ridiculous, as the shortest path to "quasi-equilibrium" is to return to the one that the introduction of this weed by humans disturbed. Introduce an invasive species, then don't "interfere" with it -- this is exactly the kind of thing this strawman-based absolutist "logic" leads to.
If, on the other hand, you are simply a conservative, and value the world as it is because that is the world you know, you should say so and argue on that basis, and not impute your conservative beliefs to some equilibrium principle that is false to fact.
Oh please. If you can't see any consequences to destroying the ecosystems that evolved on this continent in the blink of an eye beyond economic inconvenience and sentimentality, then you have no business lecturing others as if you understand the issues here.
The enemies of Democracy are