Slashdot Mirror
Invasive Species Ride Tsunami Debris To US Shore
An anonymous reader writes "When a floating dock the size of a boxcar washed up on a sandy beach in Oregon, beachcombers got excited because it was the largest piece of debris from last year's tsunami in Japan to show up on the West Coast.
But scientists worried it represented a whole new way for invasive species of seaweed, crabs and other marine organisms to break the earth's natural barriers and further muck up the West Coast's marine environments. And more invasive species could be hitching rides on tsunami debris expected to arrive in the weeks and months to come."
Anything that brings cheaper sushi, I am all for it! Best way to resolve invasive species problems... first find a way to serve them up!
Start surviving....NOW!
Sincerely,
Nature.
It seems like Tsunamis have always been around, and have always been a way for such things to happen. How is this new? How is this against nature?
Tsunamis have been happening for a few billion years, and moving stuff around for just as long. Scientists realize that.
But scientists worried it represented a whole new way for invasive species of seaweed, crabs and other marine organisms to break the earth's natural barriers
There has never been a tsunami before? WTF?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'd hate to see those Japanese tentacle monsters I hear so much about surf their way to the US—I'm not in to that sort of thing.
a "New Way" eh? Newly thought about, newly discovered, but, hardly new. I am pretty sure species have moved via tsunami for a long time now. "Drifting on ocean currents" itself isn't even a "new way" for a species to spread.
This "new way" sounds similar to the way some young people each year get the impression that they just invented spanking their sexual partner? ("OMG she actually likes it, can you believe that?")
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"Speculative news"? Whatever the case is, or what you might want to call it, it's not "news" as it is a speculative report about what may happen or what may be happening without evidence to show it is happening.
I'm not all for that sort of thing while calling it news. This is hype, not news. It's not even good hype as it suggests ridiculous things like referring to tsunamis as a "whole new way for invasive species...[to mess things up]." Uh no... not new... we "might be" witnessing a dynamic of nature that has been going on since before there was a "man kind." (Before you say anything, "God boy" just don't. It isn't up for discussion.)
Start surviving....NOW!
Sincerely, Nature.
Hmmm, you know Nature is not afraid of what will happen when these unnaturally treated pieces of wood acts as rafts for any species to traverse an ocean. Perhaps you should share some genuine concern for the effect it will have on humans. Case studies you might care to research: kudzu, zebra mussel, Asian carp and actually a lot of organisms like rats and weeds that currently traverse the Americas were brought over accidentally on ships. The full effect of them is lost to time and the Native American's knowledge of what used to be available.
My work here is dung.
This is another situation where we could have been preparing for this for a year now but it appears that the do-nothing part of government has done nothing to prepare for it. The government suggests that you recycle the recyclable debris and put the rest in the trash! So let the disaster occur and then we will spend billions of dollars repairing the unknown environmental damage. Education, prepare for further budget cuts; you're just not important anymore.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Tsunamis have been happening for a few billion years, and moving stuff around for just as long. Scientists realize that.
The problem are the man-made materials and treated woods that will survive an ocean voyage where all other natural materials would not.
When a floating dock the size of a boxcar washed up on a sandy beach in Oregon
Docks survive for so long in water because the wood has to be treated or they would blister, bloat and split and become waterlogged. As a result, when one comes loose it can act as a raft indefinitely. Same goes for plastics and foam that might have been used on houses. If you threw an untreated tree or vegetation in the ocean, it would simply never make it.
All of this will become a moot point, however, when the great pacific garbage patch finally reaches both shores and enables all water based organisms to freely traverse from Asia to North America.
My work here is dung.
San Francisco Bay is already home to a huge number of non-native species according to a local report. Trade through the port of Oakland is one of many culprits. There has been much talk of requiring different treatment of ship ballast tanks (internal tanks flooded with water to lower and stabilize ships).
A one-time shot of tsunami debris is nothing compared to the steady onslaught of commerce.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I would think this so-called species-invasion would be a fairly regular process. I expect thats how random land animals populated young Pacific islands in the first place: derbis rafting. I would not get all worked up about this.
This isn't a bad thing in Mother Nature's book. Species that are better adapted have been unable to get to these new habitats due to natural barriers. Now there's a natural event that has brought them in. And now it's time for evolution to get to work. It's not "disrupting" the balance, it's adjusting it.
Countless species have become extinct or had to move to other habitats due to evolution within and from outside their primary habitat. It's not Man's job to decide what species "aren't allowed to take over" a new habitat that WE didn't introduce them to.
It's a shame when a species loses out and goes extinct, but it's happened millions of times and will continue to do so in the future. That's just how nature works. If you don't like it, buy yourself an island and stock it with species that were unfit to compete.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
When we catch them at a roadblock, we'll know they aren't native by how they look.
Then we just slap some handcuffs on them and send'em back to Japan.
In the same vein as "You have to destroy the village to save the village."; we need to destroy the environment to save the environment.
Neither the tsunamis nor the various storms are doing anything new, it's just that the floating dock was one of the largest things to float over here on the currents in a while. As a kid my parents walked on the Oregon coast picking up Japanese glass fishing floats that had broken loose from from their nets in storms and made their way here. (You can still search for them now, but most of the floats are now plastic, and there are dedicated collectors and resellers that comb the beaches at 2am with searchlights to get them first so you'd be extremely lucky to find one now.)
Anytime a big storm or tsunami (or tidal wave if you like) would hit Japan, you knew there'd be more stuff in the currents to show up over here eventually. It often had growth on it, so those invasive species have already tried invading at about a million times a decade.
Sure it's interesting, and for a marine biologist, a great opportunity to have such a large sample delivered to his or her beach without having to spring for a very expensive plane ticket, but why are so many people going bat-s#@% paranoid over a regular occurrence.
"Oh noes! Nature has invented a means to destroy the environment, we're doomed!"
The US should be in a bubble, you never know what the filthy sea and the annoying wind might bring up next...
And don't get me started on meteorites!
More Illegal aliens coming to California..My taxes are sure to go up again to pay for their healthcare, schooling and welfare..And there goes more of my SSI
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
The smallest container ships are many times bigger than this dock. And cross in a few days, so they creatures don't have to hold on nearly as long.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The comments I read here are all about how this is natural, etc. etc. I have seen firsthand what can happen when an invasive species spreads unchecked due to no natural predators. First off, as one poster put it, this was the result of an ocean going vessel releases its ballast after leaving the ocean and entering the St. Lawrence Seaway.
See effects of Zebra mussels here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_mussel. I have seen what they can do to a river. You look at the river bottom and every rock and tree branch is covered with them.
And here's another: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_lamprey
In Florida, it appears that pythons are inhabiting FL swampland with the result that native species such as deer and rabbit are disappearing.
About the only invasive species that is a benefit that I can think of right away, though, is the horse.
I sure hope no one tries to intervene and prevent this from happening. This is not a man made occurrence, but an entirely natural one.
Right. Pressure-treated wood that doesn't become waterlogged, sink, and rot is completely natural.
Stick a natural log in a tank of water for a couple months. It will absorb water, sink to the bottom of the tank, and then start to rot. It would drift maybe a couple hundred miles in an ocean before that happens. It's not going to be crossing an ocean.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This is probably how Darwin's finches came about, via a big storm or tsunami along South America's west coast.
Think of the big tsunami in Chile a few years ago. It is in fact perhaps more likely that a tsunami brings more debris than a storm, even if I'm not sure which is more prone to bring out debris into the open sea.
1) where does "driftwood" come from then? I'm nearly certain that land-species (to say nothing of aquatic ones) have been migrating all over the world through all sorts of avenues probably about as likely or frequent as the washing up of what happens-this-time-to-be-a-manmade-object.
I grew up around 10,000 lakes and was taught that burning driftwood is a very bad idea as it contains chlorine which is, in part, why they look bone white. If a tree falls into water and becomes driftwood, it usually loses its outer layer of bark and all of its leaves. On top of that, any animal that doesn't like chlorine probably wouldn't survive on it. Go pick up a piece of driftwood and look for barnacles ... usually all you'll find are ants and insects that have inhabited it after it washes back up. And, like you would assume, long ago anything that could live in driftwood has probably long ago made the journey by chance. So the key difference with docks is that they are often loaded with barnacles. Many of them that are in bays or calm enough water are floating boxes of wood that are chained together and simply anchored in the beach. They are flat, they often contain tons of organisms seeking shelter on the beach and when they are in water, they often have one side exposed to air (or they wouldn't be used as docks). Sure, some of these have come loose over time but what you had was thousands of them during the tsunami. So that's why the scientists are concerned and, given the large number of objects you can imagine, they may have good reason to be concerned. I don't think anyone's suggesting you quit your job and walk up and down the shore line throwing GPS devices down for the US to nuke from space but locals should take note of strange new insects or anything if they notice them.
2) Not sure if you were joking, if so my apologies in advance for taking you literally. Of course, anyone who is interested in facts is aware that the 'great pacific garbage patch' (a colossal and deliberately sensational overstatement) is an area of sea where the density of microscopic plastic particulates is 'as high as' a single-digit number per cubic meter of water. I know a lot of people were fooled by environmentalists' clever 'accidental (?) misappropriation' of a picture of some plastic trash floating in the water into thinking that's what the patch is. It's effectively some water where there's a little more plastic DUST.
I was not joking and I would like to simply point out that what you call "plastic dust" is actually matter and some of it is solid and was not there a hundred years ago. I cheated and I didn't say when this transformation was complete so I could be talking about fifty years or five hundred years from now -- on the other hand I also didn't say which animals and some of them don't need a solid land bridge and are perfectly capable of swimming and have adventured far and wide up the and down the Asian coast. Others are insects that just might need something solid in water to lay eggs on and then a food source. Also, let's not make this sound like some nice homogenous even flowing plastic -- it's full of garbage and shit bigger than your "dust" (and that's a Natgeo album, not some treehugger crap). The fact is that unless we stop dumping, at some point it's going to get full and solid enough to start ejecting crap into the currents that line the shores of continent(s) and that's when you will need to take notice of transcontinental species migration.
Knowledge is power. France is bacon.
My work here is dung.
Did I miss the memo where Oregon became California?
As a kid my parents walked on the Oregon coast picking up Japanese glass fishing floats that had broken loose from from their nets in storms and made their way here. (You can still search for them now, but most of the floats are now plastic, and there are dedicated collectors and resellers that comb the beaches at 2am with searchlights to get them first so you'd be extremely lucky to find one now.)
Why comb the beaches at 2am? Wouldn't it be easier to just ship a boatload of floats from japan?
By that metric we really shouldn't bother with an endangered species list. However landing invasive species on islands is a recipe for very bad things. (ex. Cane Toads in Australia, Rats and Feral Pigs in Hawaii, Brown Snakes in Guam, Argentine Ants in New Zealand)
I don't know much about ocean species, but hopefully no Japanese Hornets hitched a ride as well. I'd hate to have them over here.
It is a large insect and adults can be more than 4 centimetres (1.6 in) long, with a wingspan greater than 6 centimetres (2.4 in). ...
Being stung is extremely painful and requires hospital treatment. On average 40 people die every year of anaphylactic shock after having been stung,[1] which makes the Japanese giant hornet the most lethal animal in Japan, as bears kill about ten people and venomous snakes kill five to ten people each year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_giant_hornet
Stick a natural log in a tank of water for a couple months. It will absorb water, sink to the bottom of the tank, and then start to rot. It would drift maybe a couple hundred miles in an ocean before that happens. It's not going to be crossing an ocean.
Care to cite a source for that factoid?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I've always hated the whole "saving the planet" "green" concepts. Polluting less and all that is a great way to preserve the current human-likable climate, but that's about it. The planet can handle our measily polluting quite easily.
But here's the exact opposite. Last I checked, tsunamis are perfectly natural events. "invasive species" gaining access to new lands is a perfectly typical historical circumstance. Stopping those species from landing on distant shores amounts to limiting their movements.
Stopping crabs from travelling the world is as bad, if not worse, than killing baby seals.
So, where are the save-the-whales people now? What if the invading species were whales instead of crabs?
It's all a load af horse carp.
i know it seems all cutesy wutesy, but if you have watched Prometheus 5 times in a row in the theatre like i have, you will know that we cannot trust these little buggers.
Because the species are INVASIVE! We're being invaded by these Japanese species which will kill all of our native species or, worse yet, mate with them and create some hybrid borg-like plant and we'll all die!
Film at 11.
This is just a part of evolution.
Tree trunks have been used for harbourage for millennia, and they accumulate sealife like anything else in the sea.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"