New research published today in the journal Science has concluded that eradicating animals on the basis that they are not native in order to protect plant species can be a flawed practice costing millions of dollars, and resulting in the slaughter of millions of healthy wild animals.
It can be argued that fighting against “invasive” species is simply fighting natural evolution itself.
Yes, humans may be responsible that something arrived in a place that it wasn’t before. But there is also no way to say that it wouldn’t have gotten there eventually on its own, and now we are trying to block it from ever happening. If it takes over and some native species die out because of it, unfortunately that’s just life. It happens constantly to thousands of different species over the millennia and we are unlikely to stop it in the long run if it really is the best adapted to a place.
I can see it being worth fighting if it damages industry or commerce, or negatively affects an area for recreation and aesthetics in inhabited areas, but if it’s simply for the sake of protecting a species then it should be carefully considered whether that species really would have survived on its own had humans arrived or not.
Isn’t this along the same lines as arguments against reducing carbon emissions (the climate naturally changes anyway, and species should be allowed to adapt on their own) or against reducing pollution (shit happen, deal with it)?
Spend a bit of time witnessing the impact invasive species can have. A formerly vibrant piece of nature goes quiet, monotonous, and ecologically deprived. Sure it still looks green, but it’s comparatively dead.
I have witnessed it plenty, I’m an ecologist. I was simply saying it could be argued. Also in case-by-case situations not as a blanket statement for everything.
But you also need to look at it from outside of our little human perspectives and from an evolutionary time scale.
In 90% of cases almost everything affected would suffer negatively in the short term, but 100000 years from now things would adapt and nothing we do would have made much of a difference.
Also humans are part of nature. If a species arrived on an island 500 years before we discovered it, and caused mass devastation to local fauna and flora that we didn’t witness, we would simply classify it as native to the island because it was there when we found it. Had we gotten there 501 years earlier we would have classified it as invasive and probably our fault somehow. Whether something arrives in the hold of a ship or stuck in the talons of a bird it still gets there naturally, we can’t just separate ourselves from nature because we think we’re special.