Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#21

Post by jschlesser »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #2

>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…

I grew up in Oxford, MS. circa 1980. Kudzu didn’t blanket the roadside landscape at that time. It does now. Every time I go back, it is the blanket over everything. I love the flowery language of the article (takes me back a bit), but it really has overtaken the landscape. If you grew up there, you know.

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#22

Post by culi »

brazzy wrote: post #17
echelon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe. 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 a…

It is not at all specialized on a single plant. It seems to like almost any leguminous plant. The reason it's considered invasive is because of the large variety of commercially important crops it also feeds on like cowpeas, soy beans, green beans, etc. Kudzu, wisteria, etc are not as commercially important but also are eaten

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#23

Post by Someone »

echelon wrote: post #13
sarchertech wrote: post #3

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…

> Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe.

FTA: “The Japanese kudzu bug, first found in a garden near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport six years ago, apparently hitched a plane ride and is now infesting vines throughout the South, sucking the plants’ vital juices.”

Looks like they have an enemy in the us that needed time to get to them.

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#24

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #2

>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…

We had a lot of it in Maryland.

I moved to New York, about 30 years ago, and stopped seeing it.

Until a couple of years ago. A house in our neighborhood had a backyard covered in it. Not sure if it was deliberately planted.

I reported it to the DEC, and it seems to be gone, now.

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#26

Post by adregan »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #12

> a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou. 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.

I believe this is referring to the sound of these words out of the mouth of a southerner. For example, have a southerner attempt to talk about kudzu to a group in Japan and they’ll have no idea what he is saying (I know this from first hand experience). Same with these other words—the vowels change and slide and are inscrutable (hard to understand) to those whom the words are native.

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#27

Post by _heimdall »

pvaldes wrote: post #20
_heimdall wrote: post #4

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?

Native species are part of the ecosystem. All coevolved in the same place for ten thousands of years at least, maybe millions, eventually creating a structure where each piece is connected with the other and fine tuned to produce the maximum value and extract the most products from our machine. "Non native species" is not the same term as "invasive". Lets imagine that the letter H in your black keyboard falls off. If…

Thanks for the details examples here! So would that mean the"when" for a non-native species to be considered native is on the scale of when it noticeably evolved to adapt to its new environment?

> 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

I guess this would also put humans at the top of the list of invasive species? That sure did sound a lot like what we have done over or history, unfortunately

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#28

Post by kwhitefoot »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #25
ratsnake wrote: post #5

Interesting, but the thing that bugs me about the article is the photo at the top - That ain't kudzu. It looks more like an invasive honeysuckle.

I don't think it's a photo.

It's by Laura Plageman: "Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010, archival pigment print, editions variable"

https://photolp.com/project/response-land

It's not exactly a photograph, but it's not a painting either.

Re: Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

#30

Post by [deleted] »

_heimdall wrote: post #27
pvaldes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native species are part of the ecosystem. All coevolved in the same place for ten thousands of years at least, maybe millions, eventually creating a structure where each piece is connected with the other and fine tuned to produce the maximum value and extract the most products from our machine. "Non native species" is not the same term as "invasive". Lets imagine that the letter H in your black keyboard falls off. If…

Thanks for the details examples here! So would that mean the"when" for a non-native species to be considered native is on the scale of when it noticeably evolved to adapt to its new environment? > 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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN