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Post by castanea on Dec 31, 2011 22:26:42 GMT -5
I wish we had elephants in North America. After all, 10,000 years ago elephants were native in North America. Camels too, before they moved to Asia. But if we re-introduced camels and elephants to their native range in the Americas, they'd destroy the ecological balance... hehehe. It's all a matter of perspective I suppose. 12,000 years ago horses were native to North America, and today the BLM is exterminating wild horses in Nevada calling them an invasive species. As far as I am concerned, the best way to preserve biodiversity in the world is the same way I preserve it in my garden. Introduce as many new species into as many new areas as possible, and see what survives. "Introduce as many new species into as many new areas as possible, and see what survives." Pretty much what Mother Nature has been doing for millions of years.
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Post by castanea on Dec 31, 2011 22:28:17 GMT -5
I have looked into the horse issue, I am convinced that they are native, and that the BLM is trying to convince us all that they are all non native because they make money off of cattle on lane after they kill all the native horses on the land. it is very sad It is sad. As I posted earlier in this thread: "I think a good general rule is to find out the federal governemnt's position on an agricultural issue, and then do the opposite."
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Post by spacecase0 on Dec 31, 2011 22:29:28 GMT -5
castanea, I like you ideas
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Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 31, 2011 22:31:42 GMT -5
interesting to hear about the birds that you see eating the russian olives. I personally havn't seen any, so maybe i need to do my own study at some point. But i do think the trees are ugly. Both invasive species and the term native are apparently arbatray and different from each person. I'd consider the beans and squash native to here. I think i would be cool to release some african lions here and have them breed with the mountain lions. I was aware of the camel bones found in this area, but I'm starting to wonder how they know if they really were camels. I mean, what if they were really something close to a camel like lamas. There are plenty of farms around here who do raise lammas. I'm not convinced that herds of wild lammas would do any damage to the local ecosystem, but perhaps camels would. I do know that the camels in Australia are apparently a major pest. I really like the horses, and i think what the BLM is doing should be against the law. I watched a documentary about it was one of the best documentary's i've ever seen. Someday i might actually start a horse herd and let them become feral. Oh, and since were on the topic of elephants... i think they should bring back the mammoth. Maybe even breed them with modern elephants. That should produce some interesting diversity. Ok, i think I'm done daydreaming for today. I think about this kind of stuff all the time though.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 31, 2011 22:55:42 GMT -5
One of my activities that I've never told y'all about is birdwatching... I've submitted thousands of observations to the citizen science project at ebird.org. So I'm very aware of what birds use what trees. It would have spoiled the moment though to say that the birds I see most frequently in Russian olive trees are pheasants and starlings since they are also non-native. Good thing esthetics issues are not up to me... I don't have the slightest sense of pretty vs ugly. Things are what they are. People are all the time telling me to look at the animals in the clouds. I just see clouds.
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Post by templeton on Jan 1, 2012 2:34:08 GMT -5
I think we might just have to agree to disagree on this one, folks.
Joseph, pm me your address and I'll send you over a pile of death adders, king brown snakes, dugites, and Sydney funnelwebs ;D
Castanea, It's not about preserving some snapshot of an ecosystem at some arbitrary time, just trying to maintain the world's genetic diversity that is left - and we don't do that by introducing species that lead to a drop in diversity, or by clearing the Amazon or fishing in coral reefs with explosives - releasing organisms to see what happens just seems foolhardy.
While a bit dated, the introductory anecdote that opens paul and anne ehrlich's book 'extinction-the causes and consequences of the disappearance of species' is worth reading. <http://web.clark.edu/smethvin/classes_pdf/Basics/gen_sociology_101/handouts/Unit4/Rivet%20Poppers.pdf>
cheers, T
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Post by MikeH on Jan 1, 2012 3:36:21 GMT -5
And with cause, I think. You examples made me think about Bermuda where I was born. It has similar types of problems though not quite as extreme as Australia's. So I googled "invasive species"island. The first hit confirms that species on closed island eco-systems get completely decimated because the off-island species that is introduced has no natural competitors. In island environments, it's often a matter of just introducing the off-island species. Nothing more is needed for them to get a toe hold and then take over. In non-island environments, it seems to me that so-called invasives exist because we create an environmental opportunity for them. The places around us where purple loosestrife does well are wetlands. These wetlands capture the fertilizer runoff from farmers fields as well as whatever other chemical crap happens to be in the area. Since that situation is harmful to native species and a bonanza for purple loosestrife, purple loosestrife thrives while the native species doesn't. The current solutions to controlling/eradicating purple loosestrife are doomed since Nature has a far larger budget than do the bureaucrats. Want to clean out purple loosestrife? Then clean up the wetlands. Regards, Mike
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Post by MikeH on Jan 1, 2012 3:52:41 GMT -5
I am happy as a lark when I see a flock of pheasants eating the seeds of a Russian olive. (Both non-native as of 1492) Dame's Rocket is considered an invasive. It was introduced by the Virginia colonists in the early 1600s. That raise the question of how long do you have to be in town before you are accepted. Re: non-native species as of 1492, at the risk of crossing threads, Regards, Mike
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jan 1, 2012 4:55:29 GMT -5
Great topic for discussion!
When I see a biologist do a calculation that includes the benefits that a new species brings to an ecosystem, then I'll be open to re-considering my position. But as long as new=bad, and change=evil, I'm perfectly content with people, animals, and weather introducing new species all over everywhere.
For what it's worth... Every species on a volcanic island is an invasive species, and nearly every one of them are doomed to extinction when the island sinks back into the sea.
Sure enough... The primary economy, namely the natural world, makes every man-made economy on Earth look like a small little toy.
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Post by MikeH on Jan 1, 2012 5:50:44 GMT -5
Every species on a volcanic island is an invasive species, and nearly every one of them are doomed to extinction when the island sinks back into the sea. Sinks? At the risk of hijacking the thread and/or stirring things up, there's another way that water level might affect species. Regards, Mike
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Post by nuts on Jan 1, 2012 5:55:02 GMT -5
Yes ,monsanto protecting biodiversity thanks to roundup,that's hilarious,not to say psychopathic. As far as I am concerned, the best way to preserve biodiversity in the world is the same way I preserve it in my garden. Introduce as many new species into as many new areas as possible, and see what survives. "Introduce as many new species into as many new areas as possible, and see what survives." Pretty much what Mother Nature has been doing for millions of years. But I have to say that the point of view that it's good to spread as many species as we can everywhere is a rather extreme point of view that I consider to be wrong. I second rather templeton and mikeH's point of view. geographic isolation is a factor that contributed to biologic diversity. This is most evident in isolated ecosystems,like many islands and the Australian continent. There is also an isolation between the northern and southern hemisphere. And even within a continent areas are isolated by mountains,deserts,or simply distance. Thinking that blending all the species of isolated ecosystems in one uniform global system will increase biodiversity seems a bit strange. That doesn't mean that spreading species in new environments is allways bad and sometimes can even increase the local number of species. But there are many exemples of introduction of species on island or the australian continent with disastrous results. Denying that geographic isolation is a factor in evolution and evolving of biologic diversity is just plainly wrong.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 1, 2012 7:36:50 GMT -5
I think the basic problem is the idea that we are actually able to control the movement of species. People have the mistaken belief that we as a human race do what we do out of choice, when in fact we behave exactly as all other species do, utilize our habitat to the limits of the available carrying capacity. Just like bacteria in a petri dish. Most of the so called "invasives" came along for the ride, and have caused considerable disruption to a variety of ecosystems. We can wring our hands and lament what has been lost, but I assure you that Nature does not.
Perhaps it could be argued that it was wrongheaded to introduce rabbits and foxes and cane toads to Australia, or mosquitoes and mongooses to Hawaii, or starlings and house sparrows and multiflora rose to North America. My contention is that those introductions or something like them were inevitable given human nature and our limited capacity for predicting the future and the complexities of ecology.
Not to disrespect Templeton and his views but my contention is that the extinctions that are going on in Australia were inevitable sooner or later, just as is the extinction of all species. I do not exclude Homo sapiens from that statement. Should we lament the loss of all of the equally unique and bizarre marsupials, birds, Rodents of Unusual Size(I am not kidding), ground sloths, glyptodonts, and other things no one will ever know about when the Panama isthmus formed and the Great American Interchange occured? Uncounted fascinating species went extinct, all kinds of species "invaded". But we had nothing to do with it.
How about 1492? There is more and more evidence that immediately following first contact, literally millions of human beings died of novel diseases like small pox, measles, mumps, and more that swept across North and South America. Its probably the most significant human tragedy in the history of our race, it makes the Black Death look like an episode of Mayberry RFD. I can't imagine anyone of any political affiliation who wouldn't want to prevent something like that. Can you think of a way it could have been? Because as far as I can see it was inevitable. They had the sailing technology to get across the Atlantic but not the medical technology to prevent the transmission of the diseases. In fact they didn't even have the medical understanding to realize that it was even an issue, let alone the technology. I don't think we have the technology even today to have been able to prevent what happened.
Species will move, we are almost certainly going to continue to facilitate that movement whether we like it or not. We are living in an age of extinction whether we like it or not. Nature will take all these species and they will come into new ecological balances . Nature doesn't care if the extinctions and invasions are cause by humans, meteors, volcanoes,glaciers, or plate tectonics. Life goes on in new and interesting ways. Watch out for those pythons in the Everglades.
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Post by nuts on Jan 1, 2012 8:16:19 GMT -5
It's easy to talk about the past,saying that everything was inevitable.
But what do we know about what is evitable in the future? Do you know what is evitable or not?
If indeed human species is to disapear does it really matter that we are compromising our survival?
Or are we able to act according to our knowledge and make the best of it?
You can be fatalist, but the problem of being fatalist is that you don't know your fate. More,your fate depend on how you're acting.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 1, 2012 9:40:16 GMT -5
interesting to hear about the birds that you see eating the russian olives. I personally havn't seen any, so maybe i need to do my own study at some point. But i do think the trees are ugly. Both invasive species and the term native are apparently arbatray and different from each person. I'd consider the beans and squash native to here. I think i would be cool to release some african lions here and have them breed with the mountain lions. I was aware of the camel bones found in this area, but I'm starting to wonder how they know if they really were camels. I mean, what if they were really something close to a camel like lamas. There are plenty of farms around here who do raise lammas. I'm not convinced that herds of wild lammas would do any damage to the local ecosystem, but perhaps camels would. I do know that the camels in Australia are apparently a major pest. I really like the horses, and i think what the BLM is doing should be against the law. I watched a documentary about it was one of the best documentary's i've ever seen. Someday i might actually start a horse herd and let them become feral. Oh, and since were on the topic of elephants... i think they should bring back the mammoth. Maybe even breed them with modern elephants. That should produce some interesting diversity. Ok, i think I'm done daydreaming for today. I think about this kind of stuff all the time though. African lions and Mountain lions can't interbreed sucessfully, their too gentically far apart. You will get offspring, but pretty much all of the males and a good portion of the females would be sterile (same as what happens when you cross a lion and a tiger) though I imagine that, if the females that were not sterile re bred with pure mountain lions for a while you might be able to get a little African DNA into the population. There is also the fact that, for some reason, when the big cat species interbreed, since different species get thier size determinors from different sides of the family, you can get hybrids that get a double dose of growth hormone. Whne that happens you wind up with big cat's that are REALLY big (there's a liger at one of the zoos in the south that's already the size of a small horse, and he's still GROWING). these giants don't tend to live long (there really to big for their body to function correctly, they're almost the aninal analog of a pathological giant.) but as long as they were, they might cause havoc out in the wild. As for bringing back the mammoth, the problem I'd have with that is the same I'd have with bringing back dinosaur's, we've just changed the environment too much. The world the Mammoths lived in is not the world as we live in now. We don't have vast stands of the kinds of grass they lived on anymore. In all probability they could not survive in the wild anymore, we'd need to build them vast artificially induced enclosures and keep them artificially maintained in the ecology of the Pleistiocene. And if you were relying on the Permafrost to provide the DNA for this experimernt, you'd mostly get Wooly Mammoths for whom much of this country (at least) would be non-native, Most of the US is really Colombian Mammoth territory (bigger, less furry) for which, given our temperate climate, there is a lot less available DNA (Tar is not great for keeping DNA intact) And if they were able to survive in the wild again, what would keep the population in check? We've killed off pretty much all of the big predators that preyed on the Mammoth. So if we didn't go around hunting them (and I'm sure the concept of bringing back an animal just so you could hunt it would stick in many peoples craws). We'd have to simutaneously bring back Sabertooth cats, and Dire wolves, and Bear Dogs, and Short Faced Bears and so on and so on (or send a lot of cryptozoologists out to the far corners of the world, and hope to God that they can find living breathing examples of things like the irukiem, the waheela the shulka warakin etc. and that they are what some crypto experts think they are.) It'd be like our Australian friends suddenly deciding that what Australia needs is the return of Thylacaleo's, Melgania's, Diprotodont's, Sleutherine Kangaroo's, Mihirung's etc.) Or a New Zealander who, trying to bring back the Moa's also decides to bring back Haast's eage to prey on it (an eagle so large that it reportedly considered Maori children a viable prey). The same way you can't simply pull one animal out without sending tremors to the ecosystem web, you can't put one back in on it's own either. If you reallty wanted to do the experiment, I'd start smaller, go with the Aurochs ( Bos primogeneus) the wild ancestor of the cow. It only went extinct about 400 years ago, and somehow I think wild cattle would fit into our current ecosystems a lot better than Mammoths would (actually I understand Australia has a feral cattle population already decendents of cows and bulls abandoned by 19th centtury homesteaders)
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Post by castanea on Jan 1, 2012 11:22:06 GMT -5
I think we might just have to agree to disagree on this one, folks. Joseph, pm me your address and I'll send you over a pile of death adders, king brown snakes, dugites, and Sydney funnelwebs ;D Castanea, It's not about preserving some snapshot of an ecosystem at some arbitrary time, just trying to maintain the world's genetic diversity that is left - and we don't do that by introducing species that lead to a drop in diversity, or by clearing the Amazon or fishing in coral reefs with explosives - releasing organisms to see what happens just seems foolhardy. While a bit dated, the introductory anecdote that opens paul and anne ehrlich's book 'extinction-the causes and consequences of the disappearance of species' is worth reading. <http://web.clark.edu/smethvin/classes_pdf/Basics/gen_sociology_101/handouts/Unit4/Rivet%20Poppers.pdf> cheers, T Maybe it's about trying to preserve genetic diversity to you, but it isn't for most people who complain about "invasive" species. And if you truly support genetic diversity then you will support the vast majority of invasive species because as Theodoropoulos has shown, most support plant and animal life and increase diversity. But deciding that you personaly want increased diversity in a given area is again scientifically and morally irrelevant. That's just what you want. Nature will always make the final decisions. What frustrates me about the entire area of "invasive" discussions, is that almost none of it has anything to do with science, morality or even nature itself. It's always about what some one wants. They want some native species growing in the next county instead of kudzu (never mind that numerous foreign species live on their property and that they eat numerous foreign species). And just killing things and wiping out vast tracts of forest is not what I'm discussing here. I am discussing "invasive" species.
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