Comments on: Messing with Mother Nature: 5 Cautionary Tales

By: Lindsey

Lindsey — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:29:00 +0000

Include the nutria in your next post on this subject. Science Daily describes it as “a 10-pound rodent pest ravaging southern wetlands in the US, which has been especially damaging to the marshland ecology in the Mississippi Delta following Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. 20 nutria brought to Louisiana in the 1930s bred an estimated 20 million animals within two decades.”

In some parts of the state, government pays people to hunt nutria and get rid of them.

By: PT

PT — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:06:00 +0000

Here in the South we suffer from “fire ants”. Tehy are so-called to one heck of a sting they produce. They originated in South America and have migrated north over the years. In S.A. an indigenous mite keeps the population under control by burrowing into their heads. I wonder what would happen if we imported these mites…

By: nihil

nihil — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:25:00 +0000

I read a book as a child, called “The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo.” It was a picture book that told the Borneo DDT story in rhyme. It was a great book. I bought the copy from my elementary school’s library when they were “weeding” old books. You can find used editions on Amazon as it’s out of print, which is just a shame. (I linked a blog post about it through my name since there’s no pic on Amazon.) The illustrations were awesome and story was a great learning tool about environmentalism.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:25:00 +0000

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I think Operation Cat Drop is a hoax. Well, not so much a hoax as a fiction. It comes from a great short story from T. Coraghessan Boyle. Unfortunately, I can’t remember in which it was published.

By: BassMan

BassMan — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:04:00 +0000

I just finished an interesting book called Suburban Safari and it amazes me just how much of the continental US flora and fauna is not native.
But as Sis Ses points out our view of what is native is colored by hsitory. Often, what we consider native here is what was already here when the first white folks arrived. Well, we’re pretty certain that the people who were already here emigrated from Asia and that they had a profound affect on the environment. Otherwise we might have to worry about running our cars into giant ground sloths instead of deer.
And who knows what sort of things we are doing today that we imagine are beneficial that our ancestors are going to look at and say, “What were they thinking?”

By: Sister Sestina

Sister Sestina — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:48:00 +0000

I’d like to see some differentiation made between inadvertent causes and deliberate introductions. Harold mentions the brown tree snake in Guam, and yes the devastation to the local bird population is huge and horrible — but near as we can tell it got there as “stowaways” in the wheelwells of airplanes. Unless you want to call the invention of aviation the “messing with nature”, I can’t put it in the same degree of idiotic culpability as the introduction of rabbits into Australia because some rancher wanted to be able to hunt them. Or what about cane toads, brought to Australia as a “safe, natural” way of controlling the beetles that preyed on sugar crops and that are now a pest themselves?

The thing is, humans having been mucking around with nature for so long that even our baseline assumptions about what is natural are flawed. Those rabbits were doubtlessly imported from England, but they aren’t even native there — they were introduced in Norman times. Do you really stop to think every time you kill a garden snail that probably it wouldn’t have been there if somebody hadn’t thought the species tasty enough to propagate centuries ago?
There’s enough of that stuff that you really needn’t pull fireweed into the same list — though I’d like to see a list of unforeseen cause-and-effects like that, as it is an issue on does need to consider.

By: danny

danny — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:44:00 +0000

i grew up in georgia and have always loved kudzu, though i never knew what it was called. or that it was a weed. bummer.

By: bas

bas — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:39:00 +0000

The book called A Plague of Frogs chronicles issues such as these. It follows an incident’s ripple effect to see how it changes organisms around it, and it really makes you think about how little we have to do to make huge changes in the environment. After reading you’ll never look at peanut butter and tupperware the same!

By: harold

harold — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:58:00 +0000

Very interesting. Unfortunately, there are many more cautionary tales about messing with Ma Nature. Hogs in Hawaii and Indonesia, brown tree snakes in Guam- it goes on and on.The biggest(but least recognized) problem now in the US is the invasion of Chinese privet into wild areas. Once established, they form dense thickets which shade out the indigenous underbrush. Common vinca is another invasive plant that frequently escapes into the wild and devestates forest ecology.

By: heatherdawn

heatherdawn — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:50:00 +0000

I personally like the pic of the cat parachuting.