You have yet to show that you have sufficient reading comprehension to decide what is “reasonable” for the state of California (vs, say, that state’s AGs).
Or the moral fortitude to address all the errors of scientific fact you’ve made in this very thread, but whatever…gallop on, son, gallop on.
I haven’t read this whole thing, but has anyone discussed humans as the introduced species?
Introducing european humans to places like Africa, Australia, Nth America, Sth America certainly had an impact on the locals.
stui magpie: that is rather than mastodon in the parlor, isn’t it?
I think I mentioned it somewhere along the way, snarking about how we presumably aren’t going to withdraw all homo sapiens to East Africa.
Trinopus, a relevant article today on io9 re: extinction rates.
MrDibble: thank you. And holy shit! That’s astonishing. It says the current extinction rates are around 1,000 times the background rate. That floors me. I would have guessed maybe “one and one half” times. Which shows that naïve, “common sense” assessments aren’t the basis of good science!
There seem to be three parts to the OP. One is that too much money, effort, emotion is being spent trying to “fight” invasive species (which, see below, are WINNERS!! and should be a source of delight because they WIN!!). And that fighting invasive species means having a hairsplitting, pedantic love for native species (aka LOSERS!!) because there’s no such thing as an ecosystem, really, there’s just winners and losers.
Personally, I haven’t seen much money, effort, or emotion being spent to fight invasive species that weren’t annoying humans in a major way. And most of the emotion involved was aimed at educating people who could possibly be making the situation worse. It’s sincere emotion, but it’s also PR.
Examples of invasive species I’ve seen money and effort spent on: zebra muscles (you’ve mentioned them), water hyacinth (blocking California waterways), hydrilla (ditto), and mitten crabs (burrow into levees, weakening them). Most of the effort I’ve seen has been education and enforcement (aka cut that shit out - also if you’re fishing and bag a mitten crab, kill that thing immediately). Water hyacinth has been sprayed for occasionally. (BTW, if you squish water hyacinth and put it into an anaerobic digester, you can make biogas. Not that that’s necessarily economical or that it would be easy to deal with the leftovers. Just FYI. Disney’s done research.)
I’ve also seen NEPA mitigations for endangered species, which isn’t the same thing as fighting invasive species, but which you might not approve of because it’s supporting LOSERS! But you haven’t mentioned it, so you might not be interested.
I have to ask if we really are spending any significant amount of tax dollars on purifying the native ecology of foreigners? Effort writing science journal articles or making press releases doesn’t count because the folks doing that would be doing something similar anyway. There’s no particular added cost to them choosing that subject or that stance.
Costs that I know about:
Because of zebra muscles and others, regulations for entering US international ports have changed, requiring ships to empty and exchange ballast water in the deep sea before entering port. Many invasives in SF Bay, for instance, had been traced to ballast water from distant bays being emptied there. It’s not going to repel anything that’s already here, but it has a good enough chance to keep things from getting worse that I’m not going to complain about it.
Water hyacinth and hydrilla have had sporadic research thrown at them because they clog marinas all through the California Delta (and other places, it’s just that I have more information about CA). They’re illegal to import, including through CA Ag stations. More on that later.
Education on mitten crabs has been added to the general information associated with fishing and boating licenses. There was some cost to generating the material, but it’s self-perpetuating now. I was amused to find that, although they are invasive, there’s a 35 crab per day limit on trapping or hooking them in the areas where they’re established.
Where they’re not established, the Mitten Crab Watch wants you to collect it and freeze it tell them all about it. Taxpayer money is probably going into the watch and into variousinvasive species programs. Again, the emphasis seems to be on tracking spread and damage and on warning people to be aware and to cut that shit out.
If there’s actual big money and effort trying to remove, say, striped bass and carp from the California Delta (they were 19th century introductions), I’ve missed it. If you know of a big effort that actually IS being spent to return to eden, please share. There are better places that the money could go. But I haven’t seen any. What I’ve seen is a lot of emotional “think of the natives” language attached to efforts whose main purpose is to keep human economic interests from being compromised. I’m not saying it can’t be happening because I haven’t heard of it, I’m just saying that I haven’t heard of it.
Part two to the OP seems to be:
You do know that this sounds just a tad sadistic, right? Like a kid putting bugs in a jar and shaking it when they don’t fight quick enough? There was a comment that some folks were showing too much anger, and how that made it hard to take their arguments seriously. And I can agree with that. On the other hand your joy in “THEY’RE WINNERS!!” seems to be interfering with you acknowledging any information that doesn’t give WINNING!! priority.
I’m not accusing you of running a dog or cock fighting ring, your interest in winning seems more abstract and pure. I’m just asking if you’re aware of how you’re sounding.
And, finally, number three, which just goes on and on.
Damn. OK. Full disclosure. I was born in California and have lived there most of my life. Stopping at the ag station has always been sort of a patriotic, we’re doing this to protect everyone kind of thing. Even my Dad, who ranted for decades against seatbelt laws, supported the valiant ag stations.
One of your entries implied that you had heard how they work. I assume, from that brief few words, that you’ve never driven through one. Let me tell you how they work.
There is a line. This is the most onerous part. When you get to your turn, you roll down your window. The ag agent says “are you transporting any fruits, vegetables or other plant materials?” You tell them yes or no, and if yes, you describe your plant products.
We’ve gone through with bananas and oranges. Apparently they don’t care about a few individual pieces of fruit that were bought at a grocery store. I’ve never not been waved through.
I’m not going to try to say what they’ll hold back, because it changes and I haven’t researched it. I’ve only gone through the stations multiple times. Lately, they ask if you have any firewood, because there’s a fungus that can infect trees that’s been hitching along on firewood.
They will also ask if you’ve hosed off the boat that you’re towing, because that’s how hydrilla spreads. If you haven’t, they’ll point you to a hose, off to the side. No, you don’t have to wait through the line twice.
The big thing is that, although it’s called an inspection, there is no inspection. If you have imported Brazilian houseplants in your trunk and you want to be an ass and say No, your trunk will not be opened. If you haven’t hosed off the boat, but you say Yes, and there’s no obvious green hanging off of it, you’ll be waved through. And since hydrilla is extremely tiny, congratulations on risking its spread, you lazy jerk.
Having “a warrant or probable cause of a crime in progress” does not apply because they’re not looking for evidence to be used against you. They’re looking for disease and parasite vectors. With your assistance. They assume that you care and that if you’re recited a list of things that could be a danger to the California economy, you’ll be honest about it.
If they see four crates of Mexican oranges in your back seat, you’ll be asked to put them in the bin over there, even if you say no. Your back seat is openly observable. And if you lie about something that’s obvious, that might be probable cause to ask you to open your trunk, but you’d have brought that on yourself. (Not you, personally. General You.)
Just to repeat. They’re not looking for evidence to use against you in a court of law, they’re only looking for things that have to be thrown into the bin before you drive on. Warrants are therefore not necessary.
TL:DR I believe that there are people making academic arguments about protecting native species and native habitat. I’m willing to let them argue. Until I see numbers showing otherwise, I’ll assume that money being spent to fight invasives is actually being spent to protect economies.
Also, nobody needs a warrant to ask you a question even if having to answer makes you feel like less of a winner. And yes, if they find spider eggs in the lovely, expensive bouquet of orchids that you bought for your grandmother, they’re not going to let it through. Even if you argue that your spiders can take on every other spider in creation. No one else cares about that. They’re following the money.
Welcome to California. Would you like to buy some orchids?
Yllaria: Excellent post.
When invasive species are harmful…then they should be controlled and combated.
When they aren’t…then I have no objection to a “market” or “survival of the fittest” approach. New World peppers, introduced to the Old World, have become an absolute culinary necessity.
Here, locally, the Bird of Paradise plant, native to Africa, is a decorative joy. It doesn’t do any harm.
It would be absurd to try to fight all important of all non-native plants and animals – and worse absurd not to try to fight the really harmful ones.
Yes, it is important to realise that there is a difference between “non-native” and “invasive”. We’re completely against Australian wattles here in South Africa. European Oak trees, not so much…
Well, yeah. To me, “invasive” implicitly indicates “out of control and noxious”.
Tomatoes might originally hail from the New World, but they’re not invasive in Europe. In fact you have to work damn hard to make the bastards grow right 
Along those lines, I offered some perhaps-useful definitions back in Post 157.
Strelitzia is, in fact, the Official Flower of L.A. (I know you’re in San Diego, not LA)
Funnily enough, both the Official Flower and Official Tree (coral tree) of L.A. are South African natives. So some exotics are just fine.
Yllaria, while I still find many points of disagreement with what you wrote, I admire your approach to the debate more than many of my other interlocutors.
I don’t know how “much” it is, but my point is not really that it’s this massive effort that is blowing a hole in our budget and pervading all aspects of our lives, but that it does exist, it seems silly (and sometimes eroding of our civil liberties), and it is worth talking about. An example, discussed on NPR earlier this year:
Sounds like a significant effort to me, which may well expand; and if the premise is adopted as part of U.S. policy, it seems to me it will have to go far beyond one species of owl.
Yes, fair enough. I wouldn’t want to *force *a polar bear to fight a Siberian tiger, but if it just happened to occur and someone filmed it, I would definitely watch that shit. 
You’re right that I have never been through one of these checkpoints. If it is all as you say, I would be more sanguine about it (though if I had a vote, I would still vote to close them altogether). I found a YouTube video though that seems to paint a different picture. Caveat: this is admittedly from a right winger who no doubt has all kinds of repugnant positions I would not care to associate myself with. But liberal civil libertarians like me and right wing libertarians (I guess they’re not civil? Seems right, LOL) can at times find common ground, and the Fourth Amendment is as good a place as any to find it.
I didn’t know that about the official flower of L.A. Doggone 'em! Much classier than our official flower, the Carnation. (Carnations are…okay…but they just don’t have the glamour of the Bird of Paradise!)
Also…plants and animals are constantly in migration. “Native” might only mean “Arrived here more than 5,000 years ago.” The migration pattern of horses is fascinating: horses went extinct in their “native” habitat (western hemisphere) and only exist here, now, as “exotics.”
It’s like the joke about developers vs. conservationists. A developer is someone who plans to build a big mansion at the seaside; a conservationist is one who built his big mansion at the seaside twenty years ago.
Let’s not confuse family or genus with species, here. Equidae has a N. American origin (not Western hemisphere, just N. America - horse evolution definitely pre-dates the Great American Interchange) and ditto for Equus, but N. Am wasn’t isolated at the time, so it is more proper to think of the whole genus, and definitely the species E. ferus, as Holarctic, rather than North American sensu strictu. And we generally only consider individual species when we refer to invasives or exotics, so IMO it’s not correct to consider the horse native to North America alone. It is true that it is now an exotic in North America. But I don’t know enough about wild horses to know if that’s good or bad.
As if knowing more would justify that kind of judgment. Good or bad for whom?
Yeah, that at least comes close. Do you include efforts to protect endangered species as something we shouldn’t be spending money on? Because there’s a lot of money being spent on that. It’s not exactly the same thing as fighting invasives. In the owl story, the barred owls aren’t being shot because they’re non-native, they’re being shot to make a preserve for the spotted owl.
I’d also note that the spotted owl isn’t endangered because it’s been out-competed, it’s endangered because too much of it’s habitat has been pulled out from under it. We took away the habitat in which it out-competes other owls and it hasn’t had time to adjust. The only way spotted owls could out-compete habitat loss would be to evolve into vicious pack-owls that can take down lumberjacks with chain saws and heavy duty log lifters. (I was going to modify that sentence to make it clear that it’s the lumberjacks that have the chain saws, but I think I like the other image, too.)
I’m sure you’ll agree that evolution is probably not up to that. (Although if you’d pay to see the polar bear and the tiger, I’m pretty sure you’d pay to see chain saw toting pack owls on the rampage.)
Without looking deeper into the owl project, I’m mostly seeing wildlife research, which I don’t mind happening just because I like research the way you like seeing things battle it out, or tasks being given to existing staff, who mostly do other things. The ethicist was bureaucratic CYA. Or bureaucratic process, depending on how you judge it. Gotta have a clear and justified mission.
There are probably a couple of contract biologists checking to see if it works, but you have to keep biologists off the streets or they’ll do things like breeding chain saw toting pack owls. We can’t have that. I’d guess the total for the project, including existing staff time, would be under $250,000. For government, that wouldn’t be a small project ($50,000 or less), but it wouldn’t be a big project either (over a million). It’s on the low side of average.
I’m rambling. The point, when I started, is that if you’re against protecting endangered species, that’s an additional thing that should be explicitly added. We not only spend tax dollars on it, we require developers and private citizens to spend their money on it. It’s a very political thing. People have loud opinions on what should be done and how much should be spent. On that topic, I will salute and say ‘rant on’. You are part of the democratic process in action.
No YouTube at work and things scheduled tonight. I might not get around to watching that. Is it existing ag stops being used for other things? I can imagine enforcement folks looking at the stops and thinking “we could leverage that.” I can also imagine agents being jerks, because jerks happen. Profiling also happens. I guess I’ll have to guess until I get around to watching.
Oh, just because guessing made me think of it. Does anyone know if driving through Colorado Springs with California rental plates is still probable cause for a search, now that pot is legal?
Um… I don’t believe I misspoke. I was quoting from Stephen Jay Gould. Horses originated in the W.H., migrated to the E.H. several times, and died each time but the last. The last time, they went extinct in the W.H., but lived on in the E.H. – and the Conquistadores brought them back “home” to the region where they originated.
I didn’t say anything about equidae, only the horse…and if I’m wrong here, hah, I blame Gould!
Wild Horses don’t seem to be particularly harmful to the environment. They’re reasonably good neighbors.
Knowing more is the only way to justify a judgement! Only knowledge can support wisdom.
Good or bad for the entire ecosystem. Invasive species that kill off other species are worse than exotic species that co-exist peacefully with others. (And, yes, humans are pretty damn bad by that measure.)
I’m pretty sure Gould was referring to the Horse family (equides) not the horse species (Equus ferus) although it’s possible the studies about the Holarctic distribution of E. ferus postdate him. Was this the Bully for Brontosaurus chapter on the recurrent “Eohippus was fox-terrier-sized” mistake in textbooks?
The genus was pretty well-established in Eurasia and didn’t die out there after establishment (see e.g zebras and asses). And E. ferus (to the best of my knowledge) never died out in Eurasia after initial establishment (hence the widespread distribution of the Tarpan subspecies). So Gould would be wrong on that one.
About what I gathered, but I wasn’t sure.