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Worst invasive species in North America
- Thread starter Weldabeast
- Start date
It's hard to pick a 'worst' but, Mile a Minute Weed is one I have started hating recently.
Why? OP asked for the "worst and most destructive invasive species." "Worst" is a subjective word, but "most destructive" is fairly objective. How much biodiversity to you see in the typical wheat field or city block? We're quite destructive. And we're definitely invasive. We showed up suddenly by boat, which is kinda how most of the other "invasives" got here. We displaced our native equivalent...
The shoe fits extremely well.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2018
- Messages
- 8,046
I wish there was a solution to get rid of privet.. I don't know that it is destructive but it is absolutely everywhere. Makes you wonder what Alabama looked like before that annoying stuff.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2018
- Messages
- 366
SJWs
"native" Americans sure look a little asian to me....
I like reading journals/books from early US explorers. According to some of their accounts from Maine to Florida ocean to Mississippi river long leaf pine dominated the landscape.
I like reading journals/books from early US explorers. According to some of their accounts from Maine to Florida ocean to Mississippi river long leaf pine dominated the landscape.
agreed man... "us" is a pretty big lump. A plant or a fish cant change who they are or how they exist and thats what causes all the issues. Humans are a little more "capable" of adapting without disturbing. Wether they choose to do so is where the problem lies. Im not an off the grid hippy but I'd like to think im not a parasite. Careful with the white european talk people...starting to tread into political waters
Western culture is evil but I sure love my centerfire, compound bow and the toilet
And don’t forget the bidet!
Yep. Invasive vs native falls apart the instant you put it under a microscope. Assuming all life is native to earth and given that all life forms are capable of locomotion, the idea loses lots of meaning and definitely gets stripped of the moral baggage the early naturalists gave it. If I ran the zoo I'd replace "native" with "established" and "invasive" with "disruptive."
And don't get me wrong, I don't suffer from "white guilt" or even "human guilt." The former doesn't really even bare on the current discussion. We as a species are just another entity trying to win at a massively complicated game that we barely understand. We know the consequences of losing, but have a really foggy grasp of what the rules are much less what "winning" means. Feeling guilty for building highways is kinda like a lion feeling bad about ripping out a gazelles throat. We don't do it to twirl our mustaches. We just gotta eat.
well put sir. you pretty good at philosophizin
Nah. I just know some of the words.
TNbowhunter
Well-Known Member
Re: your word replacement, the question then becomes “at what point?” on native vs. established. How far back do we look? Lewis & Clark time? Pre-Euro contact? Etc. That’s something that’s interested me for a while when it comes to conservation/wildlife management. And as for invasive vs. disruptive, that one feels like more of a no-brainer to me. For example, you don’t hear folks speak negatively about the “non-native/invasive” pheasant because it’s not disruptive. Asian carp (which, like the pheasant, came from, uh… Asia), on the other hand, are disruptive and are spoken about totally differently.
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2020
- Messages
- 5,945
This:
"The Grey Squirrel has made it to the Invasive Species Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union’s list of “100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species.”
And more...
Invasive non-native species (UK) – Grey squirrel - Inside Ecology
This week, Elizabeth Kimber (Ecologist), focuses her invasive non-native species article on the grey squirrel… The grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) is native to North America and was first released into the UK in 1876 by the Victorians. Grey squirrels were introduced in various places around...
insideecology.com
Periwinkle blue
You're right. I'd say established is just "what's here right now." If I grow a petri dish full of one microbe, and then another microbe is introduced and starts to take over the dish, microbe 1 is established and microbe 2 is disruptive. No moral baggage there. Just an objective statement of what has occurred in the biome. As far as time goes it's irrelevant in my mind. I could have been sustaining that culture for years or for a few hours. The latest thing happening is almost always disruptive
But when you start talking about time...man, that leads to some crazy thoughts....
Disclaimer to all: the following numbers are based on the western secular view of the cosmos. Not trying to get political or start anything. Just throwing numbers out there 'cause they're fascinating. If you don't like my numbers, bear in mind I live with the constant Ranch Fairy/Ashby FOC number threads.
Current best guess is that the universe is something like 14 billion years old. Earth we think is 4-5 billion. The eukaryotic revolution (all the critters we've been discussing) happened maybe 2ish billion years ago. Mammals enter the scene 180 million (notice the m now) years ago. Early humans showed up yesterday, or 2 million years ago. About 10,000 years ago (like, just a second ago) we started getting good at agriculture. In that time, we went from making up a very small percentage of terrestrial mammalian biomass to us and our wards compiling an estimated 96% of that mass today. Talk about sudden and disruptive. That's like opening your fridge to look for a ham sammich and when you close the door and look back at your home it's somehow been swarmed with roaches. All the prokaryotes are probably very unhappy with their rude new neighbors.
That being said, 96% sounds impressive until you realize that that 96% is like 2% of ALL the earth's biomass. Humans make up maybe 1% of all biomass today and a teeny, tiny, statistically irrelevant percentage of all biomass that has ever been.
When you look at it that way, our idea that we're going to wreck the planet is like the new hire at a decades-old company entering a number wrong in a spreadsheet on his first day and screaming about how he's brought financial ruin upon all the shareholders. It's cute. But you just never know...
If you can't tell, I think biology is fascinating. Unfortunately we're really bad at understanding it. Nobody on here gives 2 hoots about 98% of life because they either can't see it with the naked eye or it doesn't move around much. Then we very arbitrarily pick and choose from the remaining 2% (coyote bad, deer good) and try to shove a constantly evolving ecosystem into a static box. It's wild.