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Worse Than Pollution: Crazy Ants, Bird-Eating Mice and Murdering Mink
They read like creatures in a gothic novel, but the species we've introduced round the world are real and cause untold harm
Had these people tipped a tanker load of bleach into the headwaters of the river Finn, they would have done less damage. The effects would be horrible for a while, but the ecosystem could then begin to recover. The mink, by contrast, will remain at large for years, perhaps millennia. Like many introduced species, American mink can slash their way through the ecosystem, as they have no native predators, and their prey species haven't evolved to avoid them. Is there anything the animal lovers in Donegal could have done that would have harmed more animals?
But there's a second question raised by this act of preternatural imbecility: what were the mink doing there anyway? In other respects the Irish Republic appears to be a civilised country, in this case it looks barbaric. While the United Kingdom banned fur-farming in 2000, Irish governments have resisted prohibition, to protect a tiny but wildly destructive industry. The republic's five remaining fur farms are the sole source of continuing releases of mink, either through raids or accidents. They are also places of astonishing cruelty, in which intelligent carnivores are confined to cages the size of a few shoeboxes. The Irish government is considering phasing out fur farming in 2012. Until then, its citizens will continue to pay more to eradicate mink than they make from breeding them.
But Ireland is a small player. Two-thirds of the world's mink farming and 70% of its fox farming takes place in other EU countries. Denmark alone produces 40% of the global supply of mink pelts. Feral American mink on the continent are even more damaging than they are here, as they drive out the endangered European mink. The EU's 6,000 fur farms are an affront to the values it proclaims.
This month governments meet at Nagoya, in Japan, to review the Convention on Biological Diversity. It has, so far, been a dismal failure. Perhaps the starkest botch has been their inability or unwillingness to control the spread of invasive species. The stories I am about to tell read like a gothic novel.
Consider, for example, the walking catfish, which is now colonising China, Thailand and the US, after escaping from fish farms and ornamental ponds. It can move across land at night, reaching water no other fish species has colonised. It slips into fish farms and quietly works through the stock. It can burrow into the mud when times are hard and lie without food for months, before exploding back into the ecosystem when conditions improve. It eats almost anything that moves.
Its terrestrial equivalent is the cane toad, widely introduced in the tropics to control crop pests. It's omnivorous and just about indestructible: one specimen was seen happily consuming a lit cigarette butt. Nothing which tries to eat it survives: it's as dangerous to predators as it is to prey. Unlike other amphibians, it can breed in salty water: it's as if it had waddled out of the pages of Karel Capek's novel War With the Newts.
The world's most important seabird colony – Gough Island in the South Atlantic – is now being threatened by an unlikely predator: the common house mouse. After escaping from whaling boats 150 years ago, it quickly evolved to triple in size, and switched from herbivory to eating flesh. The seabirds there have no defences against predation, so the mouse simply walks into their nests and starts eating the chicks alive. Among their prey are albatross fledglings, which weigh some 300 times as much as the mice. A biologist who has witnessed this carnage observed that "it is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus".
On Christmas Island the yellow crazy ant does something similar: it eats alive any animal it finds in its path. It is also wiping out the rainforest, by farming the scale insects that feed on tree-sap. Similar horror stories are unfolding almost everywhere. The species we introduce, unlike the pollution we produce, don't stop when we do. A single careless act (think of the introduction of the rabbit or the lantana plant to Australia) can transform the ecology of a continent.
According to a government report, invasive species cost Britain several billion pounds a year. The global damage they cause, it says, amounts to almost 5% of the world economy. A single introduced species – a speargrass called Imperata – keeps 2 million square kilometres in the tropics out of agricultural production, equivalent to the arable area of the US, while ensuring that the native ecosystem can't regenerate.
In most cases there's a brief period in which an invasive species can be stopped. So you would expect governments to mobilise as soon as the threat appears. But in many parts of the world the policy appears to consist of staring dumbly at the problem while something can be done, then panicking when it's too late. When museum weed (Caulerpa taxifolia) escaped into the Mediterranean from the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, the authorities responded by bickering over whose fault it was. In 1984, when the invasion was first documented, the weed occupied one square metre of seabed. It could have been eradicated in half an hour. Now it has spread across 13,000 hectares and appears to be uncontrollable.
Australia, the continent that has been hit hardest by introductions, still seems incapable of regulating the trade in dangerous species. As the Guardian's new Biodiversity100 campaign shows, 90 potentially invasive plant species are being sold in nurseries there, while 210 species of aquarium fish can be imported without a licence. The UK has some good policies at home. It spent £10,000 in 2006, for example, on a strategy (successful so far) for excluding the South American water primrose, whose control now costs France several million euros a year. But in its overseas territories – of which Gough island is one – it reacts slowly, if at all.
The mink, the walking catfish, the cane toad, the mutant house mouse, these are potent symbols of humanity's strangely lopsided power. We can sow chaos with a keystroke in an investment bank, one signal to a Predator drone, a seed dislodged from the sole of a boot, a fish tank emptied into a canal. But when asked to repair the mess we've made, we proclaim our impotence. Our challenge this century is to meet our capacity for harm with an equal power for good. We are not, so far, doing very well.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com
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17 Comments so far
Show AllOn planet earth grey aliens bred a race of hairless bipedal apes hoping to harvest them for food or at least to make furniture out of them later on. The greys became distracted for a few million years and forgot all about them. Now look at the wreckage.
"The greys became distracted for a few million years and forgot all about them. Now look at the wreckage."
With any luck, the greys will return and commence with the-albeit-late harvest.
Chomp-chomp.
Now don't we humans have the latest defense tools to slow down the nastiest predators.
I was surprised to find that there were minks in Ireland too. So much of everyone's environment has been damamged by invasive species.
The Zebra muscle is killing the Great Lakes, along with damage from the oil industry, so perhaps they will soon be the Great DEAD Lakes.
A Chinese crab is killing native fish in California, and Kudzu is growing at "feet per day" covering everthing is the South.
Pet alligators who GROW, ( wow ,big surprise there) are ending up in the strangest places. Pet pythons in Florida do eat lots of things, and they adapt so well.
I hate to bring in more rules, but really, importing some creatures for pets is not only insane, but very costly to the people and the environment.
Ships, ( both for pleasure and for commerce) should not be allowed to dump refuse in the other nation's waters. That's how the Zebra muscle ended up here!
I suppose that the real horror is still to come, when all of those GMO crops wipe out native species and then we'll find that they have introduced a killer plant virus that kills everthing.
Cause and effect is such a lonely and forgotten concept.
Don't forget kudzu. garlic mustard. Japanese beetles.
Dutch Elm disease - American Elm - long Gone
Chestnut blight, - American Chestnut - king of the eastern forests - long Gone
Balsam Wooly Adelgid - The Balsam (Fraser) Fur, a unique Pleistocene-era mountaintop island - habitat species in southern Appalacians - Gone
Hemlock Wooly Adelgid - Eastern Hemlocks keystone species of the Applacian hollows -gone from Virginia and most of west Virginia except the high elevations, soon to be gone from Pennsylvania north and the Southern Appalacians south.
Emerald Ash Borer - The white ash is next.
Gypsy Moth - wiped out hugh swaths of forest - sparing nothing. Mostly junk species have grown in place of the Oaks and Hickories.
As far as plants - the worst scourge in my area is Japanese Knotweed. Once established in a cleared or logged area, it forms a permanent dense thicket that permits absolutely nothing else to grow, including any trees, forever. A wave of gas-drilling (conventional, not fracking) a few years ago spread the knotweed throughout western Pennsylvania.
I read sometime back of an animal rights group that I generally support stole 400 or so cows from a farmer and set them free. Within a month most had died looking for a feeding tough filled with grain only finding predators happy with the wind fall. About 60 were captured in people's back yards mooing for food and shelter and returned to the farm.
It has been said that humans only use 10% of their brains. Some it seems use much less.They are probably the ones that vote for republicans and democrats.
We are fast creating the planet we cannot survive in.
A living hell on earth is more like it.
I don't believe in killing the minks just for their skins either, but these so-called animal-rights activists were totally irresponsible in just releasing the minks without a thought about the havoc that these out of control animals would wreak on the environment. This is shameful! Responsible animal rights activists don't resort to such vicious stupidity,
How long will it be before the mutated common house mouse begins showing up in urban areas here in the United States and going after people's pets?
"Our challenge this century is to meet our capacity for harm with an equal power for good."
I can't help but wonder: If we actually lived as if we were part of Nature and bound to Nature's laws, would we even be facing this challenge?
Of course we wouldn't. We may be witnessing a scenario portrayed in the Jurrasic park movie with nature 'finding a way' with animals like this walking catfish, or Clarias batrachus. Here's a tough as nails fish that apparently isn't much affected by pollution either. After we have trashed this world, perhaps only the true trash eaters will survive and triumph... If the radiation and/or chemical pollution doesn't wipe out all life.
I think our conundrum as a well meaning (at times) but destructive (always) environment trasher is directly related too our empathy deficit. The problem isn't that we aren't intelligent enough to do the right thing in an extremely complex ecosystem. We could but we just don't give a damn because of our world view; i.e. we can go through all the 5 steps of effective mangement (plan, execute, control, feedback, correct errors and start over) of our bodies, families and social group up to that 'Dunbar Number' (about 150 individuals) which defines our caring cognitive limit. When we go beyond that into other humans or animals or what-have-you, it's all about how to game those others (resources in our caveman minds) for the benefit of our clique. Can we love a fish? We better learn how soon.
From my point of view, there are no invasive species on earth. That's a territorial concept. Before man had any noticable impact on the earth, entire species were wiped out when a land bridge formed (like to South America) and some big cat would rampage through and eat everything in sight. Common house cats that go feral in the USA and Canada are the scourge of many field animals (and I am a cat lover). Right now in Vermont there is some new wild varmit loose that is killing outdoor house cats. It's fast and they haven't caught it yet. It could be a mink.
Human science fails miserably because it doesn't teach humility. But it will all balance out regardless of our folly. And probably after we are long gone.
It's one planet and one ecosystem. The main factor causing ecological instability is the human corporate chemical and radiation life killing pollution. IT is NOT the overpopullation eating and defecating each day. Nature can handle that. Nature cannot deal with ionizing radiation, No DNA can survive it. Not even the hyperphiles that have been found that can live at 176 degreess. Man's science is the killer. The fact that putting 30 frogs in a wash bucket with a snappping turtle will guarantee 30 dead frogs reqardless of whether the snapper is hungry or not isn't the issue. WE are the issue. WE are the ones who have ships, bridges, aircraft, trains trucks and cars to move all these creatures around. I don't blame the catfish for doing what he does. WE are the problem, not the catfish.
Our ethics suck. Is it alright to experiment on dogs in order to develop a better pacemaker? No.
Is it all right to extend human life artificially with equipment made in factories that make said equipment from raw materials which are mined by species destroying and habitat trashing methods? No.
Nobody wants to look HARD at what we ARE. The moment we began 'profiting' from earth's life forms and resources to increase our comfort and longevity, we doomed the whole thing. Atomic bombs was just the final straw. Science never seemed to want to accept the fact that humans MUST live in harmony with nature or be destroyed by it. They still won't. We are a walking dead species as of about 1945. Maybe those 'greys' are here like the Israeli 'art students' on 9/11; to document the EVENT (our suicide).
I agree with much of what you wrote, but not that humans are the walking dead. Of course, I don't really KNOW whether we are, just that I can't state that with any authority - no one can.
Nature is resilient...until she isn't. We have had plenty of signals and warnings, but if or when the tipping point will come, only Nature knows.
It's also important to note that not all humans live as our tribe does. While there are only a handful of aboriginal cultures left, some still do live as part of the natural cycle. I think we can still learn something from them. Whether we can then use that knowledge as a stepping off point to the future, no one knows. It's clear we won't go back to living in teepees or huts (at least, not voluntarily), but we can learn the underlying rules and try to go forward with those in mind. If not, then we go the way of many other species. The comforting thought is that Nature will still be around.
Well said.
But I wasn't being hypothetical when I stated that ionizing radiation is an ecosystem killer. There is no species anywhere that can evolve it's way around ionizing radiation. It destroys the ability of a virus or bacterium to reproduce. This is not simply about mutations. This is about ALL STOP on reproduction. Nuclear pollution lasts too damn long for any species to get around it. When we opened that pandora's box, we doomed the planet. Our only hope is eliminating all activities that generate ionizing radiation (except certain UV light water and air purification applications which are easily contained). This is not debatable. Hence, my claim to 'know' that we have doomed the ecosystem. Nature cannot work it's way around ionizing radiation, period.
IF we could do our 'nuclear thing' OFF the planet, like on the moon, I would see no problem with it. But you can't mess with that stuff here. Isaac Azimov wrote a short story about it. In the story, alien bean counters at some galactic library are cataloging civilizations as they reach the 'viability' point (when nuclear energy is discovered). The 'librarian' enthusiastically moves homo sapiens from 'pending' to 'viable'. He then asks how far from the planet were the nuclear devices tested. He had to sadly move the category from 'viable', not back to 'pending', but to 'unviable' when he was informed that the nuclear explosions were atmospheric.
A purely technical answer to the Gough Island housemouse problem: there is an ideal poison for rodents. It is Vitamin D. The commercial form is called Quintox, a bait loaded with the vitamin, which is far more toxic to rodents than to other warm-blooded animals. That means that if the birds (or your cat) eat a dead mouse, or even the bait, they get a vitamin supplement. A few thousand dollars' worth would at least minimize the problem on a fairly small island.
Most of the others are probably ineradicable. Around here, the biggies are English ivy and blackberries. At least we can eat the blackberries. Ivy is poisonous.
Actually, Ivy, a member of the Ginseng Family, can be used medicinally. Of course, the difference between medicine and poison is dosage. It's not meant for munching on, but neither is it useless.
Which brings up a good point. Just because we don't understand life, death, suffering and evolution completely, it doesn't release us from our responsibilities to the planet. Earth doesn't care about species the same way we do, species come and go, earth survives. We have a right to survive, even thrive, but not at the expense of so many other species that call this place our home.
However, while the current awareness of some of the effects caused by "invasive species" is overall a good thing, one can have too much of it. To wit: Does it make sense to spray a watershed with toxic chemicals, thereby removing the invasive species threat (for the time being, until the new one comes along, and it will, because until we do re-integrate with nature, we are the ultimate invader bringing our fellow invaders everywhere we go) but causing potentially more harm just in another fashion?
Intact ecosystems, however we choose to recognize them, ought to be preserved and conserved, but prevention of these conflicts is always best and seems to be the last thing anyone thinks about. It's all hyperbole and damage control. What if some of these invaders turn out to be life savers? Do we really think we have the wisdom to see into the future and understand how these different species in new places (for them) will integrate? Perhaps they will help us survive climate change or be the resource for new substances, or energy, or medicines. But we spray and kill before we think in nuances.
I admit to being biased, as an herbalist, I regularly have to defend those nasty, "illegal," invasive weeds from people who think of nature as a museum, when instead, we have lived with nature, in nature, as an integral part of nature since we began.
For an interesting take on the whole Invasive Biology concept, you may want to check out the book of same: Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience by David I. Theodoropoulos. It may broaden your thinking, whether you agree with his premise or not.