11–20 of 54 posts
Lantana, Cactus and Cats Claw in Australia. Everyone talks about the cane toads but ignores the weeds
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-quest...
. . . and you wonder why we close our borders to easties .. :-)
Gumbo and jambalaya are hardly inscrutable, these dishes came straight out of West Africa. Bayou and Yazoo, like Ouachita, Natchez, Natchitoches, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee etc. are all from First Nations.
The kudzu bug invasion was unreal. I used to live about half an hour from the Atlanta airport where they came in. One summer there were suddenly swarms of them around my house. Anytime you went outside, you’d get a few on you. The next year the swarms disappeared, but if you shake any given kudzu vine, several will fall off. It’s like they were buzzing around looking for the kudzu. Then once they found it they stayed…
It was crazy. If you walked outside, you'd have two or three of them crawling on you by the time you walked back in. They'd find their way into your house, your car - you'd breathe them in if you weren't careful.
I still don't understand what happened. They were a brand new / invasive species, but their initial surge was biblical in proportions - a "swarms of locust"-like plague. In the years that followed, the population dropped to the point you would only see them if you looked.
Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe.
The only similar event I can recall were the swarms of Japanese beetles (false June Bugs) in the 90's. Those were so bad that if you shook any standing tree, a thousand of them would drop on your head. But that only happened every seven years or so.
Perhaps they're all periodic, like cicadas?
>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University. This was my experience as a child. W…
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,3...
This stuff is all over Georgia.
The kudzu bug invasion was unreal. I used to live about half an hour from the Atlanta airport where they came in. One summer there were suddenly swarms of them around my house. Anytime you went outside, you’d get a few on you. The next year the swarms disappeared, but if you shake any given kudzu vine, several will fall off. It’s like they were buzzing around looking for the kudzu. Then once they found it they stayed…
That was about a decade ago, wasn't it? It was crazy. If you walked outside, you'd have two or three of them crawling on you by the time you walked back in. They'd find their way into your house, your car - you'd breathe them in if you weren't careful. I still don't understand what happened. They were a brand new / invasive species, but their initial surge was biblical in proportions - a "swarms of locust"-like plagu…
Isn't that obvious? It's a species specialized to feed on one plant, and it met a huge amount of that plant which was previously undisturbed by its preying. The result is explosive, actually exponential growth, until there are more beetles than the plant stock can support. Then the beetle population collapses, and after that an equilibrium develops. Cyclical variations can develop under certain circumstances, especially when there are strong seasons.
The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me. When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?
Most of the species in my garden are non-native (another term that is often used for less virulent invasives), but they don't colonize the native landscape. The term "invasive" is sometimes used for plants that could otherwise be fine, but will get out of hand in some cases. Bamboo, for instance.
Source: none, but I used to take care of shrubbery for one of my first jobs and I learned a lot about invasives. I hated Brazilian pepper trees the most ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schinus_terebinthifolia ), mainly because they're quite difficult to remove.
The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me. When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?
Which honestly describes humans pretty much everywhere…
The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me. When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?
"Non native species" is not the same term as "invasive". Lets imagine that the letter H in your black keyboard falls off. If you replace it by a blue key from other keyboard you end basically with a functional keyboard. Sometimes non native species fill a empty spot and restore a lost system functionality without affecting the other species. Sometimes they even boost the whole machine. A good example would be a native tree from the forests of Kazakhstan that is everywhere, the domestic apple tree.
Invasive species would be like replacing all the keys in your keyboard with the letter H. They turn the machine basically useless. Instead to work with the ecosystem, they destroy it, eliminate most species, and replace it by a much cheaper version. A worse system that is more simple, less stable, and has barely the minimum functionality for us to survive