Extinction and alien invaders

An article just appeared in The Guardian about invasive species. It motivated me to write this:

This has been happening since man started moving around with their germs & domesticated crops & animals. What's new is the rate of the invasion.

Fact 1: This is irreversible.
Fact 2: eradication may and often does backfire. Our understanding of ecosystems is inadequate.
Fact 3: We are responsible for initiating a mass extinction on this planet due to our ignorance.

Even now we continue to perpetrate this disaster and globalisation has truly opened up the disaster market. As someone else pointed out, climate change is adding to the stress, not only on the species level, but also on the ecosystem level.

So live with it folks. England's green and pleasant land will look quite different in the future. And invasive species like Japanese knotweed, Himalayan balsam, or giant hogweed are only the first ambassadors of change.

The eel is almost certainly gone from British rivers as yesterday'S Guardian reported. Aggressive Chinese mitten crabs and signal crayfish have invaded our rivers (at least you can BBQ the crayfish). I imagine the Nile perch is not far away from gobbling up what's left of our indigenous fish.

That's the tragedy. Ecosystems are being pushed into extremes where only the toughest, pollution resistant species can survive.

Some invaders fill new niches, such as the parakeets that are now at home in many cities, but others like the rabbit have wrought destruction in Australia.

One thing is for sure: Homo sapiens have made a right mess of things in the paradise we evolved in.

And in reply to another poster here:

fishsnorkel 22 Jan 2010, 11:32AM

Yes, we're the cause, but if it wasn't us, it would be something else.

But what else could cause all this damage? This mentality is frighteningly similar to that of the opportunistic thief: "Well it was just asking for me to steal it. If I hadn't someone else would." You might be intersted in the concept of anthropogenic extinction. Others talk about the Holocene Extinction: scientists estimate that during the 20th century, between 20,000 and two million species actually became extinct, but the precise total cannot be determined more accurately within the limits of present knowledge. Up to 140,000 species per year (based on Species-area theory) may be the present rate of extinction based upon upper bound estimating. Personally I prefer the term Anthropocene, which describes the period we are now in, which is rapidly changing the face of the earth due to the effects of our activities on the planet. Wake up and smell the roses, or the balsam, whichever is going in your garden now.