Showing that you are completely, hopelessly and, apparently, stubbornly, wrong about your understanding of the very precise term you (mis)use in your OP is not “semantic nitpicking”, Gish Jr.
Every plant that is outcompeted takes with it an assortment of insects and microfauna (nematodes, fungi, bacteria, and more spiders than anyone would really comprehend). The macrofauna also suffer, of course, whenever any plant becomes less frequent in the ecosystem.
Humans are macrofauna.
For obvious reasons you aren’t the one deciding which of the few remaining species are worth protecting. You are right that it’s not cheap, and you are right that the battles are often lost before they are begun, but you are wrong that they aren’t worth fighting. Sometimes we win, and I really doubt the effort has ever rubbed much skin off your tender butt.
So it will cost a lot of money and probably won’t work, but it’s worth doing. Got it.
If all of the vegetation dies off, you cannot just reseed with desired (former live natives) species. What happened to the pollinators? What happened to the animals that are gone because their food supply vanished? What happened to the ability of the soil to hold water and not erode away?What happens to the migratory species that depend on the original flora and fauna to give them shelter and food and rest? The complexities go on and on. The problem with this discussion is that to make an educated opinion requires a lot of knowledge, and even then there are many consequences that we don’t forsee.
Decisions about science actually require some knowledge, and making decisions based on a political or economic principle results in poor decisions.
There’s a correlation between how large a species’ native habitat is and how prolific it is. Species that live in very restricted environments like islands have evolved fairly low reproduction rates so that they don’t outstrip their food supply. In addition they often are smaller as well so that enough individuals can coexist to maintain a large enough gene pool. By contrast, species from the Eurasian landmass have much more room to move on if one area becomes overused, and in fact the individuals that are prolific are more likely to have at least some of their descendants make the migration.
The problem is when a species used to populating millions of square miles gets put into a much smaller ecosystem. It will overpopulate, wipe out the more sedate natives, strip its environment bare and then collapse. If the invader species doesn’t go entirely extinct it may eventually- as in tens or hundreds of thousands of years- re-evolve a prolificacy level better adjusted to its habitat size.
So there is an objective measure whether a species can be considered invasive.
The island argument is a reasonable one. But most of the cases I hear about are in the continental U.S.
This is a common refrain from Chicken Little environmentalists. And not just concerning invasive species, but regarding any change to the environment. They paint a picture of an ecosystem with a food web that is intricately interlocked such that any small change can send cascading and catastrophic failure through the entire system. But my impression is that they fail to see how resilient the system actually is. (Take for instance the adaptation to climate change that is already occurring: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-species-are-evolving-due-changing-climate-180953133/)
I’m not saying that a change or a loss of one species does not change the ecosystem, but I am not persuaded that a massive collapse is what usually happens.
What makes you think America is so special?
Hell, have you ever even heard of kudzu? Zebra mussels? Snakehead?
An article including in the subtitle “but adaptation doesn’t guarantee survival”, and many entries loaded with qualifiers and caveats. And the timeline of climate change, while rapid by geological timescales, is positively glacial compared to invasives.
Meanwhile … Dendroctonus ponderosae just loooves climate change…
North America is a (largish) island, at least compared to Eurasia. Especially as the Americas are oriented north-south, which narrows the clime at a given latitude (as Jared Diamond pointed out). The effect isn’t as severe as on a small oceanic island but it is notable. A example of it working the other way is the North American grey squirrel; it is threatening the British red squirrel because the greys are adapted to a larger environment than the British isles.
The massive collapse started a long time ago and is ongoing, dumbass. You just aren’t bright enough to recognize or care about the consequences.
You should know better than to insult another poster.
Warning issued. Don’t do it again.
“It turns out it’s man!”
We don’t need them, but malaria and yellow fever and West Nile virus sure do.
As someone before posted, your “let them battle it out” attitude is surprisingly sadistic. Another poster also noted that you contradicted yourself in protecting various species of whales because they are “sentient enough” to “deserve protection”. All living organisms are sentient to some degree. Excessive pain is an occurrence that we try to minimize for people as well as other organisms. It sounds like your approach to it is like Descartes’ in that they are “inferior” creatures. It is difficult to know for sure without monitoring active nerve impulses in the brain itself the amount of pain emotional levels in different animals. Yet, because of this, we remain quite apathetic about the subject.
As many have said, just because one has proved itself to be the “fittest” does not mean that we should let it eradicate inferior species. Because marine environments are much more interconnected then land environments are, an invasive species cannot exist. On land environments, certain animals have adapted to certain conditions. Take for instance the python being introduced to the Everglades. It is dominating the environment because of the previous fiercer competition that it has known, and adapted to. They are dominating and thus reproducing so quickly that indigenous species cannot keep up. As Idi Amin once said, “You cannot run faster than a bullet”. You can’t exactly call humans “natural” when we’ve defied pretty much every other expectation that other animals can’t hold up to! Take for instance the chimpanzee. Someone told me recently to read a book called The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. Part of it describes how the ability to intuitively use intent for certain actions, or to learn languages by restructuring quickly with imitation what other people say to form our own words. The chimpanzee is our closest relative, in evolutionary terms, but it cannot process intent like we can, just imitation.
Basically, what I’m trying to say here is that humans have brought species that indigenous species are not ready for. Organisms are supposed to be constantly competing, living in relative harmony, without a species unfair arrival. For instance, take the Galapagos Islands. You can’t find more isolated biodiversity than this beautiful set of islands. Humans want to visit the island to see its natural beauty, but ironically may end up destroying it by bringing red ants and rats. Red ants are quickly destroying many species of bird found on the island, and rats are devouring tortoise eggs. So now, to counteract this, tortoise eggs need to be artificially incubated in a laboratory and kept until they are about three years old.
I suppose if you are okay with rats, parasites, rapidly producing insects, diseases, raccoon, et cetera, to reduce to extinction the beautiful species that exist because they are predators of things that had relatively no predators before, then sure, have at it. But you are acting as if it is a matter of fairness, that those who evolved to be better deserve to prey on the weak. It is not the fault of many species that they had no predators, e.g., the Galapagos Tortoise.
I see you have many qualms about room in the budget for such nonsense and what you call a violation of civil liberties. There is plenty of room in the budget. Reduce the budget for the military, be smarter about how the funds are used. They are already doing some of this. Instead of paying each biologist or hunter a significant sum to hunt an invasive species, I see that they are offering rewards to the hunter with the largest number of python heads and offering small monetary rewards to the rest. And if necessary, increase spending. In regards to how you felt your civil liberties were violated, it was a little hard to read with all that flag waving in my face. It has already been established that the Constitution has been wrong many times over; even the Bill of Rights is outdated and filled with obvious negotiation conditions between state and federal government proponents (The tenth amendment). The second amendment is widely discussed as an impenetrable shield for gun-nuts. The third amendment has little to no relevance today except for the implication of domestic privacy. So maybe, instead of declaring that things are “Un-American” or using the Constitution as an impenetrable shield from which to strike, you should perhaps actually argue why the contents of such a document are relevant.
And in essence, what it comes down to is that lazy people has unintentionally spread invasive species elsewhere. They did not “deserve it”. They had help to take them there in the first place. So that point is moot. Come on, is it really that bad to work for a nicer looking Earth, at least? If we spread around nature and let it take its course, we’d have a much uglier world, with mass extinctions.
Interesting and passionately argued points. But I see a difference between trying to protect a remote ecological niche like the Galapagos and trying to prevent “invasion” of areas in North America. We have already irrevocably altered the ecosystem here compared to what it was in pre-Columbian times, just an eyeblink ago in the grand scheme of things. Even a few eye blinks before that, humans came across the land bridge and killed off many of the large mammals that had been here for ages before that.
AFAIK you are only half correct. Recent research points to a case of a double whammy, the climate change that took place then caused a lot of the mega fauna to concentrate on less places than before and with less numbers; when humans came they were likely the ones that did the grace shot but the problems the fauna had were already there when humans showed up.
What that points is what worries many about climate change, it is likely that a lot of the extinctions that are coming will be because the changes will reduce the habitat of many species and encounters with invasive species could be deadly for a species.
Much of the North America that used to exist before European settlement irrevocably altered it still exists. If we blink one more time, that too will be gone.
What worries me is that the previous ecosystem was a balanced ecosystem that has evolved to various states of perfection (according to Lamarckian evolution, that is), and an invasive species won’t just “replace” another more “unworthy” species but will decimate much of the fauna and thus the flora of the landscape (particularly if the species ousted are pollinators or seed carriers), leaving it much more barren. You also treat this like a sport. As many have explained, the competitors of the invasive species do not, in fact, have “home field advantage”. They have evolved with having different types of competitors, predators, or prey, whereas the invasive species lived in a much more competitive environment. As someone posted before, the predator is not “fitter” over the prey. It is the competition of multiple species for the same food source. As for watching evolution in action, we do not need to. Using our knowledge of paleontology and fossils, we can pretty much work out for ourselves the whole process. If you want “evolution in action” there are computer simulated environments with the behavioral habits, eating habits, et cetera of species to observe.