The casting of ‘invasives’ as ecological villains has long been backed by scientific and political consensus. Yet as species increasingly move into unfamiliar regions, a favouritism towards natives is growing harder to defend. The traditional approach of trying to stop invasions and eradicate successful invaders isn’t just costly and often ineffective. It may be entirely the wrong approach, if we’re concerned about the environment. While some invasive species are truly harmful and need to be fought, others are a healthy ecological response – they’re part of how the biosphere is adapting to humanity’s environmental impact.
It’s about damned time.
That whole “invasive species” thing has always frustrated me.
“Oh no - the invasive species is out-competing the native species!”
Yeah - that’s one of the ways by which evolution has always worked. Some species that fills some niche finds itself forced to compete with some “invasive species,” and it either adapts or dies out, and either way, nature ends up with a species that better fills that niche.
I can just see conservationists getting ahold of time machines and going back to the moment when the first sea creatures crawled up onto the land and going, “Oh no! An invasive species!” and kicking them back into the water.
“Invasive species” is a technical ecology term used to describe plants and animals that face no predation in a given environment and have a negative effect on the other species native to that environment. Like many other scientific terms, it was misused by people without the technical understanding.
The crux of your argument is species drift compared to forced mass introduction, but there’s a huge difference between them. It’s similar to the difference in outcomes that can occur when somebody surfaces after deep diving. Go slow enough, and the systems have an opportunity to acclimate to the changes and respond. Go quickly enough, and things break and start impacting systems around them in a cascade. That’s the thing that gets missed every time I see this sentiment.
I can get behind that tbh.
(Honestly I felt the same even as I was writing it, but I went with it anyway.)